


when you're sitting on a throne

by StarberryCupcake



Category: Dragon Ball
Genre: (for vegebul specifically), Anxiety Attacks, Briefs Family, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Eventual Romance, F/M, Family Dynamics, Family Feels, Family Fluff, Family Issues, Father-Daughter Relationship, Father-Son Relationship, Fluff and Angst, Fluff and Hurt/Comfort, Guilt, Hurt/Comfort, Married Life, Other, Romance, Royalty, Saiyan Culture, Saiyans, Slow Burn, queerplatonic Trunks/Goten
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-05
Updated: 2020-03-05
Packaged: 2021-03-01 04:53:53
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 27,120
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23019613
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/StarberryCupcake/pseuds/StarberryCupcake
Summary: She needed answers, she needed certainties, she needed to know if she had to fix the ship sooner rather than later because they were no longer a part of his life, now that he had the one he always wanted.She needed to know if they were the collateral damage of the best second chance possible for someone whose true destiny had been stolen at age 5.Vegeta is asked to step in as King of the Saiyans of Sadala after their King dies, and the legacy he once thought was his to fulfill threatens to drift his family apart. Set a decade after the end of Super & Broly.
Relationships: Bulma Briefs/Vegeta, Chi-Chi/Son Goku (Dragon Ball), Minor or Background Relationship(s), Trunks Briefs & Son Goten
Comments: 27
Kudos: 98





	1. Won't you come through, take this burden down, my eyes are searching for the crown

**Author's Note:**

> Specific warnings for the fic include: talks about past death, past torture and a scene involving an anxiety attack as well as anxiety-inducing guilt.  
>  **Important note:** this fic was originally posted in March 2020, I re-edited now in December into separate chapters, since I felt it was the right thing to do for this story.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A new world that is very familiar, and a family that starts shifting.

_Beware the patient woman, 'cause this much I know:_

_No one calls you honey when you're sitting on a throne_

[ **_Valerie Broussard - A Little Wicked_ ** ](https://open.spotify.com/playlist/1OAnG5DcGEpU4b426VTrEP)

The walk was long. Unnecessarily long. 

Trunks adjusted the brooch of his cape, which kept riding up his throat, and he imagined the weight of it choking him. Which would be, he considered, a better outcome than having to take any more of the crap he was currently putting up with. 

“Keep still, boy.” 

Vegeta was still looking ahead, walking with purpose with the three steps of separation that the protocol required.

“And stop fussing.” 

Trunks had a million things he wanted to say to that, especially considering that, at 24, he was no longer a ‘boy’, but decided it would be for naught. 

“This is stupid,” Bulla stated some of his thoughts. 

She was getting increasingly more vocal as she grew into the 10 year old Princess that she was. Their father didn’t chastise her in the same way he would have done to him, though. Which was expected, Trunks considered, he had learned to get used to that. 

They reached the door, which was also unnecessarily large. Trunks thought of how ironic that was, coming from someone like him, born in privilege and money on Earth. 

But their Earth Empire was practical. It came from invention, from doing something, from offering something useful to the planet. Which didn’t make classism on Earth any more ethical or right, but it gave him a sense of identity. His grandfather was an inventor, his mother was an inventor, he would be one as well, in time. 

This Empire though...this didn’t feel like his. He didn’t know this grandfather, he barely knew his own father, considering all he kept from him, and these people didn’t want him there. With some reason, he considered. He was an outsider. On Earth and in there. 

At least Earth was familiar, though. 

“Three step separation until we reach the throne,” his father commanded, frowning at the door and ignoring the presence of the two guards in each flank, “three second pause between each, as we sit down.” 

“We get it." Bulla sighed. 

“And _silence_ ," Vegeta sentenced.

Trunks turned slightly to Bulla, three steps behind him. She looked up and didn’t need to speak for Trunks to know what she was thinking. He was thinking it too. Every day. 

_I miss mom._

* * *

“How are the kids doing?” 

Goku leaned on one of the motors, ignoring her frown of disapproval. 

“I wouldn’t know, they don’t allow them here.” 

Bulma looked away from her friend, pretending she could hide how she felt about that. But Goku was, albeit clumsy and naive with social conventions, the most emotionally perceptive person she had ever met. 

“Can’t Vegeta do anything about that?” He sat down beside her, on the cold lab floor. “He’s the King now, right?” 

“That’s what we’ve been told.”

“And a King can do pretty much anything he likes, right?”

“That, I don’t know.” She sighed. “It seems to me that Saiyan customs are...quite strict with some things.”

“But can’t a King change that?”

“Maybe he doesn’t _want_ to change them.”

Goku frowned in confusion.

“I don’t think he would want you in here all the time, if it was up to him,” he said “trapped in this lab, working on your own.” 

“I haven’t seen him since the day after we arrived, so I wouldn’t know what he wants.” 

Bulma stood, frowning. 

“And frankly, I don’t care, I need to repair this ship so we can leave...at least, those of us who _want_ to.”

She turned to him, her frown fading.

“How is _your_ family?”

“Not as bad as yours, I guess.” 

He smiled his characteristic cheeky grin, standing up as well and dusting off his backside.

“Chi Chi is adapting better than anyone imagined.” 

“Oh, you knew she’d like it.” Bulma smirked. 

“Well yeah...I knew she missed it, the chance to fight.” 

“I can see that.”

“It’s difficult for Chi to admit that she loves it, that she misses it, because she thinks she was supposed to leave it behind with marriage...which I never understood.”

“Of course you didn’t.”

“I never asked it from her, but she just...felt it was necessary.”

Goku shrugged, but there was fondness in his smile as he spoke of his wife. 

“Here she has an excuse for it to be part of her life again, because it’s…”

“Socially relevant for a housewife to do?”

“I guess...I knew that she missed it, she even trained Goten as a kid, so I’m glad to see her happy like that again.” 

“You two are disgustingly adorable sometimes.” 

Bulma wanted to admonish him but couldn’t help the smile. 

“Videl is also fitting in as much.”

“Oh, I bet she is." Bulma sighed. “They’re both Earthlings, like me, but at least they fight.” 

She took a trench and started dismantling one of the exploded sides of the closest motor. 

“Maybe if I had a bit of their strength, I wouldn’t have to be exiled to lab duties.”

“Bulma, you _are_ strong.” 

“Not in the way Saiyans count it.” 

She used increasingly more force with the trench, her fingers turning white with the pressure on it. 

“I just hope my kids are treated better than I am because otherwise…” 

“I’m sure they’re ok.” Goku put a hand on her shoulder. “We’ll go back home, you’ll see.” 

She stopped and turned, looking at her best friend in the eyes. 

“Thanks for sneaking in here to talk to me every day.” 

She threw her arms around him, remembering the little boy he used to be, how his tiny shape used to fit in her arms back then. 

“I’d go mad without some company that actually _speaks_ to me.” 

“You’re welcome.” Goku hugged her back. “If I see Trunks or Bulla, I’ll ask them if they want to join...it’s difficult to sneak into the palace though, and I don’t want Vegeta to be mad.”

“That would be generous, coming from him right now.” 

“Don’t get angry with him,” Goku said, patting her head, “he’s doing his best.”

“I hope you’re right.” She took a step back. “Now go, enjoy the spunky fighting wife that has come back to you.” 

“She never really left.” 

Goku winked before instant-transmitting himself out of the lab. 

And, just like that, she was alone again. 

* * *

“Your Royal Highness.” A guard stepped in front of his path, blocking the entrance door. “You aren’t supposed to leave the premises unaccompanied.” 

“I’m just going to the outer encampments.” Trunks frowned. “I’m going to see my friends."

That was a very simplistic, unfair way of putting it. Not that he would be averse to visiting the entire family, maybe get some of Chi Chi’s meals, to remind him of home, maybe talk to Gohan about what was happening in the palace, maybe get infected by Pan’s uplifting energy or by Goku’s characteristic happiness. 

But what he really wanted to do, what he was actually going there for, was to see Goten. 

It had been weeks already, weeks of not even hearing about him, and combined with his father’s mood, Bulla’s sadness and the fact that he had been unable to see his mother, it was all taking a toll on Trunks’s psyche. 

He needed Goten. He needed his energy in his space, his ki around him, his voice telling him that it was going to be alright, even if it wasn’t really. 

They hadn’t been apart like this in so long, and the fact that this time it was forced, that he wasn’t allowed to reach out to him, was making Trunks even more uneasy. 

Trunks had stopped trying to leave after a few attempts. He hadn’t insisted because he felt somewhat conceited. He didn’t want to seem like a bratty prince who always got what he wanted, he didn’t want to go around disobeying the rules his father had relied on him, he didn’t want to disappoint him. 

But this isolation was drowning him. And, unlike his mother, Goten hadn’t had a say on it. 

He didn’t want to seem like a prince who always got what he wanted, but then again, he just wanted one thing. 

“That’s a lower class sector, Your Highness,” the guard insisted, “you aren’t supposed to go there for...recreational purposes."

There was a clever form of contempt in those words, which had various effects at the same time: making fun of Trunks’s intent to mingle with ‘the low class’ while trivializing the need he had to see Goten. 

Trunks’s energy shifted around him. 

“Excuse me?” He knew he was channeling his mother’s tone but he also considered it appropriate. “I’m not allowed to see my own mother and I’m not allowed to see my friends?” 

“Your Majesty surely can explain it to you." 

The guard’s tone was condescending, with the right level of appropriate wording. Trunks couldn’t hold his words against him, they weren’t anything but correct, but he could sense in the way that he said it the same sort of contempt that Bulla and himself had been subject to since arriving. 

He turned on his heels and walked towards that damn council room. 

Trunks opened the door with more force than necessary and almost ripped it from its hinges. 

His father looked up from the maps scattered on the table, as did Cabba, who was standing, as usual, right beside him. The rest of the Sadala Army, reluctantly, stood up with some weak pretense of respect to his title. Except for Caulifla.

“What is the meaning of this, boy?” His father frowned. “Can’t you see that we’re in a meeting?”

“Why am I not allowed to see my friends?” 

His tone, again, sounded a lot more like his mother’s than he would have expected. Or maybe it was just that he missed her so. 

“We went through that already, through basic protocol…”

“I don’t _care_ about protocol,” Trunks interrupted.

He could hear some of the soldiers gasp and one female soldier say something in Saiyago to a colleague in hushed tones. Probably an insult. 

“I stood back when you decided to banish mom, because she asked me to be patient…”

“I’m warning you, boy…”

“Because, even though I think it’s _nonsensical_ and _unfair_ , she asked me to stand by you anyway,” he continued, undeterred and increasingly more upset, “but I draw a line at my friends...I draw a line at Goten.” 

“They’re fine.” Vegeta looked him in the eye, his expression indiscernible to Trunks’s anger. “They will adapt in the meantime.”

“I want to see them.” Trunks glared. “I want to see my friends, I want to see Goten.” 

The _I want to see my mom_ remained unsaid, but Trunks felt it was as clear as if he had started with that. 

“You are not a child anymore.” Vegeta’s fists clenched the map he was holding. “Surely you understand that there are more pressing matters than acting a fool around the planet with Kakarot’s brat." 

Trunks had options. Limited ones, but he had them. 

He could blast the entire room apart, maps and documents be damned. 

He could listen to his father, as he usually did when he used that Tone, and leave the room. 

He could demand being let in on the whole political affair that was going on in there, which was probably what his father actually considered honorable. 

Or...he could just do whatever he wanted. A suggestion which came to him in a voice that was, again, not unlike his mother's. 

He shoot an energy blast to crack open a window and shatter it to pieces, not looking away from his father, and flew through it, on his way to find Goten. 

If he could have flown all the way back to Universe 7's Earth, he would have done that too.

* * *

_“I can’t stay, though, I have a date in like...15 minutes.”_

_Trunks was about to drop the controller but caught himself in time. His back was turned, which was a relief._

_“Oh...yeah, of course, you should go.”_

_What did he have to do? Wish him luck? Ask him to tell him how it went later? Was he supposed to care how it went? Was this ok? Was_ he _ok?_

_“Are you ok?” Goten, as usual, voiced what he couldn’t._

_“Yeah, of course, why wouldn’t I be?”_

_Trunks busied himself putting things away, which was, he considered, a productive outcome to the situation, since he hardly ever tidied his room._

_“Alright...if you say so.”_

_Goten sounded hesitant. He didn’t move from his spot, Trunks could tell._

_“Maybe I should…”_

_“No!” Trunks turned around._

_Goten looked at him with worry. Concern. Hesitation. This was not right, he was messing things up._

_“You should go,” Trunks said, “you’ll be late and that’s rude.”_

_“You know a lot about dates, huh?” Goten was kidding, but Trunks felt it like a stab._

_“I know a lot about being rude.” That wasn’t a lie. “Now go.”_

_Goten waited, looking for something in Trunks’s expression. He didn’t seem to find what he was looking for, because he turned towards the balcony._

_“See you later, then.”_

_Goten flew out of his bedroom, towards the sky, which was turning dawn into night._

_When Trunks was on time for dinner, minutes later, his mom was surprised. His father and Bulla hadn’t returned from their training yet, which was a relief when his mother asked the unavoidable question he was expecting._

_“Where’s Goten?”_

_“He’s on a date.”_

_Trunks was nonchalant enough while responding, he considered._

_“Oh, honey…”_

_“Mom, no.”_

_“But, I thought…”_

_“It’s not like that.”_

_“I know, but…”_

_“You don’t_ understand _!”_

_The silence was heavy in the kitchen and Trunks hoped his father wouldn’t intrude to find out what he was shouting about or, even worse, silence him._

_“I don’t have an issue with him dating,” Trunks said, his voice small, “it’s not...it’s not like that.”_

_“But something is bothering you.”_

_Bulma approached him and he instinctively found a spot in her arms._

_“I just...I don’t know if we’re on the same page...about what this means.” He gestured, all encompassing, at himself, as if Goten was somewhere in there with him._

_It felt like that, most often than not. His ki had somehow gotten used to fusing with his, as if there was a Goten-shaped space in it, a place where both connected, like two puzzle pieces._

_“You should talk to him.”_

_“Mom—”_

_“Trunks, I beg of you, don’t be like your father.” She ruffled his hair. “I may not completely grasp the way that your relationship works, it’s always been either friendship or romance for me, but if there’s one thing I’ve learned about both is that communication really helps.”_

_Trunks groaned._

_He was somewhat apathetic during dinner, but his father was silenced by one of his mother’s looks and Bulla was too preoccupied about learning to control her ki properly to notice something missing._

_Trunks wouldn’t have to wait long for his mother’s advice to come in handy, though._

_Goten’s ki appeared hovering outside his room later that same night. It wasn’t unusual for them to see each other later than they used to, especially after both of them turned 21 and decided to do whatever they wanted with curfew (as long as Vegeta and Chi Chi didn’t find out), but Trunks wasn’t expecting him until at least the next day._

_“Hey.” Goten entered his room and sat on the edge of his bed. “Were you sleeping?”_

_“No.” Trunks sat up. “Weren’t you on a date?”_

_“I was.”_

_“So, why are you here?”_

_“It’s over.”_

_“You’ve been out for like 2 hours, at most.”_

_“It was enough for…” Goten sighed. “We did what we had to do, she went home, I came here.”_

_There was a lot he felt he could talk to Goten about but that...that hadn’t been something he was eager to discuss._

_“Oh.”_

_He felt unable to expand on that, as underwhelming as the response was for a subject matter that clearly meant a lot to Goten._

_“Are you upset?” Goten’s voice sounded small. “Are you...disgusted?”_

_“What?” Trunks climbed down from the bed in a single movement. “No! Of course not!”_

_“I was afraid you’d...I don’t know...that you’d be disappointed.”_

_“Because you had sex?”_

_“Yeah.”_

_“Goten, you’re a grown adult, you can do what you…”_

_“You know what I mean!”_

_Trunks could see Goten’s profile in the moonlight, his expression almost hidden in the darkness. He looked small, afraid. He looked as if what Trunks would say could either heal him or destroy him with the same ease._

_He knew exactly how that felt._

_Trunks sat beside Goten on the edge of his bed. He didn’t turn the light on, he felt that some things were easier to voice in the dark._

_“I was afraid too,” he confessed, “afraid that you’d leave.”_

_Goten turned to him, frowning._

_“What? Why?”_

_“Because this...me..._ us _...maybe it isn’t enough for you.”_

_Goten turned to him, sitting sideways so he could face him fully._

_“We’re different, this is different.”_

_“I know, that’s what I mean.”_

_“Is that a problem for you?” Goten’s voice turned soft again. “Do you want something else?”_

_“No!” Trunks turned to him fully as well. “No, it’s not...this is good for me, this is…”_

_Trunks sighed, frustrated with his lack of eloquence for something that felt so normal, so easy. It felt right, it felt effortless, but putting it into words was not, because he hadn’t grown up around anyone who had taught him how to name it._

_“You’re crucial to me, Goten.” He looked him in the eyes, in the profile painted halfway in moonlight and stars. “You’re a part of me, you’re...my soulmate, if such things exist...and this is all I need.”_

_He reached out for his hand._

_“I don’t care if you have sex with people or if you want to be with other people in more...romantic or sexual or traditional ways, I just...I want to know where I stand, I guess.”_

_“Stand?”_

_“If you think that we need to be traditional for our relationship to be crucial, then you’d eventually leave.” Trunks frowned. “I don’t need anything else than this, with you.”_

_Trunks sat right across from him, their knees almost touching, as if they were meditating together. And, maybe, they kind of were._

_“But you’re not like that, and I get it,” Trunks continued, “and I guess I worry that if you need the other stuff, and if to you it’s like it was for my parents, your parents or Gohan, that they have all of it in the one person, then you’d be with me like this until you find that person who gives you the whole package.”_

_Goten frowned. Trunks was sure he’d let go of his hand but he did the opposite and held it tighter._

_“No, that’s not gonna happen.”_

_“You can’t know…”_

_“I know because it’s different.”_

_Goten had said the word many times in the conversation, but it was the first time in which Trunks could sense the true meaning of it._

_“It’s different, what I expect, what I want…” Goten frowned, also finding it difficult to explain it. “You are crucial to me too, this is important, the same way it is to you, and if I ever find someone else for other...for other things, they would have to understand this.”_

_“What if they don’t?” Trunks looked down. “What if your partner doesn’t want to share you like that? and they_ do _want the whole package?”_

_“Then they’re not worth my time.”_

_Goten took Trunks’s face in his hand, lifting it up to look him in the eyes._

_“As long as you want to be with me like this, then I’m ok.” Goten smiled, his face transforming in the moonlight with a hope Trunks hadn’t realized had been gone before. “We can work out the specifics as we go, but know that where you stand for me is exactly where I stand for you.”_

_Trunks let himself fall into Goten’s arms, feeling an immense sense of relief._

_“Are you sure it doesn’t bother you?” Trunks felt his voice small again. “When you said that about the dating experience…”_

_“I’m sorry.” Goten’s arms tightened around him. “I didn’t mean it like that I...I was just...I thought that you were disappointed in me.”_

_“Don’t be daft, it should be the other way around.”_

_“It should not.” Goten kissed the top of his head. “You’re perfectly ok and you deserve to know about what I’m doing or feeling because what we have is important to me and I wouldn’t want you hurt because I’m out getting laid.”_

_Trunks blushed at his boldness._

_“Why did you come back?”_

_“I felt weird about how we left off and I was scared we’d grow apart because of it.” Goten leaned back on the bed, taking Trunks down with him. “I felt I was right in doing what I wanted but wrong in not knowing if I was hurting you for it.”_

_Goten was lying where Trunks had been minutes before, with Trunks’s head over his chest. It felt natural and safe, it felt familiar, comforting and peaceful. It was ironic how he had so many words to describe it yet so little to name it in a way in which others could understand._

_“I was hurt, but not because...I just was scared you’d leave...I have this thing of feeling like I’m not good enough, you know.”_

_“Yes, I know, you’re a mess.”_

_“Hey!” Trunks tried to disentangle himself from Goten’s arms._

_“What do you feel we can do together?” Goten asked, just like that._

_There was silence again, Trunks becoming immobile in the darkness._

_“What do you mean?”_

_“Well, I’m a very...demonstrative person by nature.”_

_“I’m aware.”_

_“And sometimes I don’t know which things I can do with you.” Goten’s voice was firm, confident. “I’m afraid it would make things weird in our gradient, you know?”_

_“I guess…”_

_“Like, people see kissing as a romantic thing to do but it doesn’t have to be necessarily? We hold hands too, and that also got our parents in a spree the first time they saw us.”_

_“...”_

_“It wouldn’t change things for me, I would feel the same way and all, but I just want to demonstrate affection in a way I feel like it shows what I mean and I don’t know how to,” Goten said, “but I don’t want to make you uncomfortable, or make things weird between us like that, I don’t want us to do something that feels like we’re crossing a line.”_

_Damn, when had Goten become this mature? He had always been more talkative about feelings but still, Trunks felt he was so much more emotionally developed than he was, at times. Maybe it was a family thing, Goku seemed like a pretty emotionally honest person, for what his mom said._

_His father, though…_

_“Did I freak you out?” Goten ruffled Trunks’s hair._

_“No, I’m fine, I just…” He sighed. “I’m processing...I’m a lot more incompetent in the feelings department than you are.”_

_“You’re not incompetent, you just don’t give yourself enough credit.”_

_Trunks turned on his back, facing the ceiling. He could feel Goten’s arm on the back of his neck, the silence between them companionable in the darkness._

_“I think it’s ok to try as we go, I mean, I wouldn’t think of it more than I do with hand holding or hugs and…” he raised his arm, gesticulating all-encompassing to themselves “...this.”_

_“Yeah, that’s what I meant.” Goten’s voice was so certain and unafraid, a stark difference from what it had been earlier._

_“We can work it out as we go, I think,” Trunks decided, “and see how we feel.”_

_There was silence again, but this time it was charged with something Trunks wanted to ask and didn't dare._

_"What is it?" Goten asked, reading Trunks’s hesitation in the silence._

_“Do you...need to talk about it?” He turned sideways, prompting himself on his right arm, to look at Goten in the face. “About the date and all? Because I know I’m not...useful for that kind of thing but I’d like you to talk to me if you need to.”_

_Goten was looking at the ceiling, an almost imperceptible smile on his lips sketched under the moonlight._

_“It’s ok...I mean, there’s not much to say this time, but I would like to talk to you about these things, if I can, I feel like I want to tell you about everything and it was kind of painful not to be able to talk to you about this.” He turned to look at Trunks. “Thanks for letting me.”_

_“You don’t need to thank me, asshole, it’s part of the thing.”_

_“The thing?” Goten teased._

_“_ Our _thing.” Trunks shoved him lightly._

_Goten laughed._

_“Thanks anyway.”_

_Goten kissed his forehead and took him in his arms, and Trunks fell asleep like that, cuddled in that sense of safety and familiarity and ease._

_It seemed both an eternity and a second later, at the same time, when his mother’s voice woke him._

_“Yes, Chi Chi, he’s here.”_

_Trunks opened his eyes with difficulty, the sun streaming from the open window hindering his first attempts. He had his arms wrapped around Goten’s torso, who was stirring with his mother’s voice as well._

_“Goten, sweetheart, your mom is on the phone,” Bulma said, approaching them, “apparently you never came home from your date last night and you didn’t tell her where you went.”_

_Bulma’s eyes were both understanding and severe._

_“Oh, shit.” Goten propped himself up, as Trunks let go of him._

_He climbed down from the bed and took the phone from Bulma’s hand, apologizing profusely to his mother._

_“So, you talked?” Bulma smiled at Trunks._

_“Yeah.” He smiled back. “Thanks for the tip.”_

_“I may not know much about what you guys have,” she said, turning towards the door, “but I learned a lot about the magic of communication since I met your father.”_

_Trunks couldn’t quite imagine his father opening up to anyone, but he guessed that, if there was someone who could convince him to, it was his mother._

_He knew, after all, that there was one true royal ruler in their house, and she wore a lab overall instead of a crown._

* * *

Bulla heard the explosion from her room. 

At first, she associated it with her mom, she was always exploding things in their lab back at home. 

When she ran to the window, though, to spy what was happening, she saw Trunks flying away, removing his cape and letting it fall on a statue of who she had been told was King Sadala. 

She wanted to cry, but she frowned her tears into submission.

Bulla knew, in her heart, that Trunks wouldn’t leave her all alone. He was probably coming back for her, he wouldn’t leave her there, in that place where people looked at her as if she was wrong. As if she had been born broken. 

She heard voices and looked down through her windowsill. There were two Saiyans speaking, and Bulla could notice, half a second before they turned, that one had seen her up there, looking. 

They didn’t move, though, they didn’t act as if they cared that she was there, seeing, listening. It was as if they wanted her to hear them. 

“When the King takes another wife,” one of them said, “a _proper_ wife, maybe we’ll get a rightful heir to stay behind with us, rule us properly.” 

“It’d be best,” the other agreed, “King Vegeta is a good King, but these Earthlings are a mess.” 

“A proper Saiyan wife is what he needs.” The first one snickered. “One that’s actually worth fighting for, not a machine-fixing servant.” 

There was a split second in which Bulla considered shooting them an energy blast. She wanted to hurt them, to see them straining in her hands, apologizing profusely to her mom, taking each of their words and eating them back up. 

Bulla really wanted to cause damage, big damage, let her rage take hold and dictate what to do with her body, because she knew that when she was angry, it was easier to fight. 

And she would have done it, hadn’t she also felt so exhausted and sad.

The idea of her father changing them for another family, a Saiyan family that could be what they weren’t, wasn’t as far fetched anymore, after so many days without experiencing the family environment that she was used to. 

The silence, the strain, the separation, the unshared words, it was all so _not_ them. They were a family that shouted out their issues and amended them, albeit clumsily, together. They weren’t a family who harbored resentment silently until someone blasted a window and stormed out, hopefully not for good. 

Or maybe they were and she had never fully noticed. 

Bulla had read stories with princesses in them all her childhood, and none of them were like what had actually happened when they arrived to the palace and she became, rightfully, a Princess. She felt so alone. 

But she _wasn’t_. 

Bulla frowned, in a way that her brother always said was so much like dad’s way of doing so. She clenched her hands into fists and concentrated. 

She could do it. She could find the ki that belonged to her mom, as weak as it was, beating in a palace filled with Saiyan energy.

* * *

Vegeta walked along the hallway, faster than necessary. He wondered if he could physically run from his own thoughts. 

Trunks’s outburst had been...difficult. 

He could hear his own words back at him and knew, perfectly well, how he had failed him. He could understand exactly the point of break because he was an expert on finding that tiny sliver of hurt in someone’s heart and thrusting his words, sharp as glass edges, right in there. 

One of the things he _knew_ Trunks hated was when someone trivialized his relationship with Goten. 

Vegeta assumed it was a blend of things. He had never talked fully about it with him, he didn’t exactly know how it felt for him but he knew how important they were for each other, in whatever form that was and as unconventional as it was for him to understand. 

And he was so stressed, so tired, so overwhelmed, that the moment Trunks showed up, demanding and shouting, all he wanted was...to get rid of him. 

He said the words he knew would hurt. He underestimated, underplayed, his need to see Goten and he minimized the impact the separation from Bulma had on him. It was just as if he had pushed him out the window himself. 

Vegeta shook, his pulse quivering, his body drenched in cold sweat. What had he done? What was he doing? 

His relationship with Trunks was so frail, he felt it didn’t take much to severe it completely. He had spent all of Trunks’s childhood acting distant and detached, while he hovered around him, looking for him, for his approval. 

He loved his son. He would die for his son. Why couldn’t he show it? 

By the time Trunks grew up, Vegeta figured he was done waiting for him to show it. He was probably tired of expecting Vegeta to be the father he deserved. 

And Vegeta didn’t know how to mend it. He didn’t know how to open up. 

He let himself fall on the floor of the hallway, his back against the wall and his cape obscuring the weakness of his body. He was alone but he felt as if he was pressed against millions of invisible voices. He finally had the Kingdom he had been destined to own and all he wanted was to get his family back.

As he laid there, trembling in the darkness, he felt once again the sharp realization of how he missed the comforting warmth of Bulma's ki. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The title of this chapter is from the song [The Crown by Leah](https://open.spotify.com/playlist/1OAnG5DcGEpU4b426VTrEP), from the playlist that accompanied me while writing this fic


	2. I will be your warrior, I will be your lamb 'til queendom come

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Old and new conversations start digging into the Saiyan past and the family's future.

_“Do you ever miss space?”_

_Bulma was sitting in an armchair, looking at the night sky. It was something she had done frequently, since she was a young girl._

_Her sister was the 'space enthusiast' of the family, and Bulma’s experiences in space had not been ideal, to say the least. She was comfortable in her permanence and was more home-bound than she admitted. She liked adventuring as much as the next person, especially when she was younger, but she couldn’t imagine not having a home to go back to, when all was said and done._

_Vegeta was sitting on the bed, his back propped on more cushions than strictly necessary, reading a book._

_Bulma had realized, many years after they first met, that Vegeta enjoyed learning and reading, but he often did it in private. She noticed that it was something Saiyans weren’t meant to prioritize, even less under Frieza’s rule, so he had grown accustomed to hiding whatever he was reading when someone came across him._

_The first time Bulma had seen him and commented on how uncharacteristic it was to see him reading, he had pushed back and not opened up about it for months. He was like a baby deer with some things, and Bulma had the tact of a bull in a glass shop. ‘Mutual adjustment’ was an understatement for their relationship._

_“What?”_

_Vegeta didn’t even look up from his book, a thick volume of essays about politics that he frowned intently at._

_“I’m asking if you ever miss space.”_

_Vegeta sighed, marked the page he was at, closed the book on his lap and turned to her fully._

_“You are going to have to be more specific.” He frowned. “Space is vast and I had multiple experiences in there...for example, if you’re asking about my time with Frieza, then hell no.”_

_“No, I’m just…” Bulma turned to the sky again. “The part of not being attached, I guess.”_

_“Attached?”_

_“Yeah, I mean…” She hugged her legs, folding them towards her chest. “I can’t imagine what it feels like to roam around like that, being everywhere and anywhere, finding new places and people all the time.”_

_“I don’t think it’s something you’d like…”_

_“Kami, no.” She laughed. “After Namek, I realized how much I’m_ not _a space person...”_

_“I still can’t believe you survived Namek, to be quite honest.”_

_“Excuse you, I’m resilient as fuck.”_

_“I’ve noticed.”_

_“I didn’t even die, while you, on the other hand…”_

_“Hey!”_

_“Too soon?” She smirked at him._

_Vegeta sighed, resolute on not engaging in a fight for petty things, apparently. Which was incredible growth, if you asked Bulma._

_“I have to admit that the first time I saw you in Namek, I couldn’t quite understand why the fuck they had taken you with them.” Vegeta opened the book again. “I mean, it’s not like baby Gohan and Krillin could do anything against Frieza either, but you, roaming around like a yellow target, that was insane to me.”_

_“You remember what I was wearing?”_

_“At first you were appropriately terrified, or so you looked, but then you became cocky and I was just expecting you to die at any moment.”_

_“You didn’t kill me, though.”_

_“It took me a while to realize your worth.”_

_“I’m not sure that’s a compliment…” Bulma frowned._

_“I was used to measure worth in power levels and fighting capacity.” Vegeta’s eyes were lost in the book, but his thoughts seemed to be elsewhere. “So in my mind you were a liability in Namek or wherever you were taken to.”_

_“I’m waiting for the positive side of this…”_

_Vegeta continued, as if he hadn’t heard her._

_“But then you started producing mechanical marvels in seconds, things that the Frieza Army had taken years of bloodshed and tyranny to appropriate.” He wasn’t looking at her, but she felt incredibly seen nonetheless. “And even without your father’s help, you could make miracles out of nothing, and I saw how your friends depended on you, and how far behind your train of thought they often were.”_

_Bulma was speechless, for once. He had never confided in her how his appreciation had changed, especially early on, in the times in which they were still shouting at each other for anything and everything._

_“I admitted to myself that I underestimated you by judging you by your power level alone.” Vegeta looked at her, finally. “I never really told you because I was a prideful dick at the time…”_

_“That past tense is questionable…”_

_“But,” he interrupted, “I always admired both your intelligence and your resilience, even if I had never been raised to see virtue in anything other than power levels.”_

_Bulma smiled, a bit giddy with the sudden compliment._

_“You Saiyans are so one-dimensional.” She shook her head, almost laughing._

_Vegeta remained silent for a while, but it was a companionable and cozy one._

_“And, to answer your initial question, I do sometimes miss some of the things that I felt while roaming in space, but it’s difficult to see them isolated from the bad things surrounding that past…” His eyes got lost somewhere far away again. “Also, I think it’d be impossible for me to feel as detached again, I would be on space wondering how the three of you are doing, if I had to leave.”_

_“You’d miss us?” Bulma teased. “Boy, did we tame you.”_

_He turned to her again, a half smile on his face._

_“That you did.”_

_Bulma took one last look towards the stars, shining brighter, she felt like, after the rain had cleared completely. Some droplets were still rolling down the window panes, like tears streaming one last time before the good cry was over._

_She stood from the armchair and moved to her side of the bed, leaning her head over Vegeta’s chest, as he kept reading._

_“What is it this time?” She closed her eyes, not sleepy but content._

_“Some treaty about international negotiations, I gather,” he responded, “this city and its neighboring ones are not at all politically developed, but apparently other places are aware of how politics work.”_

_“You’re telling me that a city re-named after Mr. Satan is_ not _an example of cultural and political advancement?” She didn’t move from her spot. “The shock.”_

_“You have a point.”_

_“I always do.” She tightened her grip. “Read aloud.”_

_It was more a demand than a request, but he was fine with that. He smirked and started reading, his diction and handle of the language a stark contrast to what it had been when he started learning to read their books._

_It had been something of a sore spot for her for a while, that back then he had retreated from her when she found him reading, yet he had asked her_ mother _, of all people, to teach him to read their language. She took it, at the time, as a personal offense, as a way in which he showcased how little he considered her. But she had learned, in time, that he was_ embarrassed _._

_Bulma’s mother explained, in confidence, how he was completely lost with written language in prose, because his handle of his own language and of other forms of communication had been limited to what he was taught. He had learned to read messages through Scouters, power levels, commands in machines, codes, give computers the order to start healing tanks, give spaceships orders to fly...everything required of him. But he hadn’t been taught written language at large, because it was a risk for him to learn and become rebellious._

_Vegeta could program a healing tank in seconds, but he wasn’t familiar with the nuances of figurative language, organized political discourse or the literary richness of written storytelling. And he was intimidated by the fact that Bulma was, as her mother had quoted, ‘terrifyingly smart’._

_He accepted his weakness in a field and wanted to train to catch up. As he always did._

_Nowadays, that seemed long gone. He read with ease and he also interjected his own commentary, criticism and opinions, most often heated, because he could not be low key about anything ever. And Bulma enjoyed that wholeheartedly._

_“You Earthlings have devised such multiple ways to flex politics to_ avoid _war.” He frowned at the pages. “It’s creative, at the very least.”_

_“Don’t worry, I won’t tell other Earthlings you said that,” she mocked, still lying on his chest, starting to drift off._

_She finally found sleep with his voice as a known lullaby, the cadence of his intonation and the sharpness of his commentary. She felt, vaguely but surely, how his arms carefully placed her on her side of the bed properly and how his lips caressed her cheek goodnight._

* * *

“So you just _bolted_?” 

Trunks covered his face with his arm at Goten’s question. He was lying down on the ground, in some mountain in the wilderness of Sadala, with Goten sitting beside him and smirking at the recollection of events. 

Feeling Goten's ki so close was helping his energy settle back, his heart regaining a steady rhythm.

His father had told him once, as he grew up, that the Saiyans he knew weren’t intended to have meaningful relationships. This made it easier to let go when necessary; fathers and mothers sending children away, generals letting soldiers die, sometimes taking their lives themselves when they under-performed. He didn’t know it for sure but he supposed his father spoke from experience on the latter one. 

Trunks hadn’t really understood it in full context until they were in Sadala. He realized how the attachment was perceived as even more outrageous when the bond was between two Saiyans of such different class ranks, even with the power level they had. He assumed the same could be said for his parents, with his mother not even having a power level relevant to Saiyans, and Goten’s mother being an Earthling. 

It wasn’t like with Caulifla and Kale, in which one of them exhibited incredible bursts of power when prompted. This was a situation unprecedented for the Saiyans of Sadala, in many ways.

“You’re _such_ a drama queen, Trunks.”

“Shut up.” He pushed Goten without true force behind it. “What else was I supposed to do? I’m tired of this bullshit.”

“But what was your plan? Running here and staying with the dirty low class?” 

“See? That’s also bullshit." 

“I know, but we kind of don’t have a choice, until we can return.” Goten sighed. “Dad told me your mom is trying really hard to fix the ship.” 

“He saw her?” Trunks sat up abruptly. “How? Did they let him pass?” He smirked. “Did he punch some guards?”

“No, you asshole.” Goten slapped the back of Trunks’s head, playfully. “He used instant transmission.” 

Well, that made sense. 

“How is she?” Trunks lowered his voice, concerned. “Could he take me to see her?”

“They haven’t let you in?” Goten frowned. “In weeks?”

Trunks lowered his eyes. 

He felt guilty. He should have done more to see her, to help her. He was conflicted by what she had asked him to do and what he really wanted. And, in the end, he had ran. 

“Hey, don’t beat yourself up.” Goten took his hand and squeezed it. “I’m sure my dad can take you, maybe if you talk to her you can feel better about it all." 

“I don’t know...I…”

Trunks put his face in his hands, wishing he could finally _go home_. 

“She wants me to go along with this, she thinks it’s important to my dad.” He shook his head. “I don’t understand how he can be so _selfish_ though.” 

“You think he’s doing all this just for himself?” Goten cocked an eyebrow. “I don’t know, Trunks, I think you should give him a _little_ more credit than that."

“It’s not like he has talked to me or explained to me anything else than stupid protocol and rules I have to follow." 

“Yeah because it’s necessary...we’re outsiders.” 

“So?” 

“Well, maybe it’s hard for you to see inside your bubble of a palace, but people here have a way of living, a culture." 

Goten looked towards the camp far below the mountain they were in, smiling faintly. 

“They have customs that we’re interrupting with our Earthly ways.” He shrugged. "Mom says playing along is the least we can do to respect that, even if she finds some things uncomfortable.” 

“But you’re treated like shit for being…”

“Low class?” Goten laughed. “For what Gohan and my dad told me, this Universe seems to have kinder, more respectful Saiyans, so we can thank our luck for that...but it’s still a warrior race, even if focused on justice seeking rather than conquering, so some things stay the same and a strength-based class system seems to be one of them.”

“You, Gohan and your dad are stronger than any other Saiyans around here, I’m sure.” 

“Yeah, but there are rules, Trunks.” Goten shrugged. “Rules they’ve been using for ages and we can’t come in and change as we please, especially after they found out it was your dad and my dad who influenced the changes in Cabba, Caulifla and Kale.” 

“They think we interfered?” 

“Possibly, I mean, we kind of did." 

Trunks sighed, letting himself fall on his back again. 

“You’re saying I’m being disrespectful because I want to see you and my mom without having to punch my way through the planet?” 

“I’m saying that maybe what your mom meant is that we’re visitors and we should try to be...understanding of that.” 

“I won’t forget I’m not fully Saiyan, they wouldn’t let me.” 

“They’ve told you something?”

“They don’t outright _say_ it, which is what bothers me the most, but it’s pretty clear, in the way they treat me and Bulla, as opposed to my father."

“You _are_ the Prince though.” Goten smirked. “The bratty little Prince who has a tantrum at 24 and blasts a window to run from home.” 

Trunks wished he had the energy and willpower to tackle him down the mountain. Instead, he frowned, which only made Goten laugh fondly.

“Talk to your mom,” Goten offered, “she’ll know what to do, she always does.” 

“When did you get this smart?” 

“Someone in my family had to not be completely naive.” Goten smirked. “People seem to forget that I’m not Gohan but I’m also _not_ my dad.” 

“You’re too much of a bastard to be either.” 

Goten pushed him playfully as he got up and dusted off his pants. 

“If they give me shit in the camp because I’ve been fraternizing with the Prince, I’m gonna make up nasty rumors about you.” He winked. 

“Don’t you dare!” Trunks shouted at Goten’s retreating figure. 

“I’ll tell my dad to fetch you and take you hom...to your mom," he shouted back, blowing an exaggerated kiss as he sprinted down the mountain at Saiyan speed. 

Trunks sighed but couldn’t help smiling, feeling less tense than he had in the past long and tiresome days. 

* * *

Bulma was too focused on a very stubborn panel which didn’t want to move, so she failed to notice that the door to the lab opened. Steady footsteps walked intently towards her. 

“Mom?” 

She turned to see her daughter, dressed in all royal Saiyan garb, a cape over her shoulders and a pout that threatened to release a sob at any moment, like thunder before the storm. 

“Hi, baby.” Bulma opened her arms, welcoming, and Bulla ran to them. 

“Mom." Bulla cried. “I miss you...”

“I miss you too, sweetheart.” Bulma sat on the floor with her daughter in her arms. 

She hadn’t hugged Bulla in _so_ long. She was at a stage in which she thought mom hugs weren’t ‘cool’ anymore, and in which she preferred to follow her father around rather than her. 

Trunks had always been more interested in tinkering with her in the lab, Bulla wanted to be like her father. A true Saiyan Princess. 

Bulma had assumed that she would love this. Yet here she was, crying in her arms. 

“It’s ok baby, I’ve got you,” Bulma whispered. 

Bulla had started to breathe more evenly when Bulma felt the immediate energy shift that she had learned to expect from an instant transmission from Goku. It was unusual for him to show up twice in one day. 

When she turned, though, she saw that he wasn’t alone. 

Trunks was standing beside him, his head low, his eyes lost. He was wearing a similar garb to the one Bulla was sporting, sans cape. 

“Special delivery.” Goku smiled. “And it seems to be just in time for a well-deserved family reunion.”

“Partially, at least.” Bulma smiled back. “Thanks, Goku.”

“No problem.” Goku slapped Trunks in the back, with maybe a bit more force than necessary. “Come back to visit us, Trunks.” 

“If I’m allowed...” he muttered. 

“When has that stopped you and Goten from doing something, though?” Goku laughed. “Bye!” 

And he was gone. 

Bulma already missed his happy-go-lucky presence, especially in that moment. She felt so overwhelmed, so unable to find reassurance for herself, let alone her kids. 

But she had to. 

“Come here, you.” Bulma opened her left arm in invitation and Trunks ran to her, just like his sister, tucked in her right arm. 

She had missed them. She had missed them _so much_. 

“I gather that neither of you are having a good time.” 

“I hate it.” Bulla furrowed closer to her still. 

“We’re not wanted here, mom.” Trunks sighed. “Dad is, but not us.” 

“I know it’s probably hard for them to understand...there’s a lot to unpack about the history behind the culture that you come from.” 

“History?” Bulla looked up with her inquisitive frown, so much like her father’s. 

Bulma knew this was not her job. This was _Vegeta_ ’s job. This was his history, his legacy to tell to his children. She had waited for him to sit them down and explain, even though it was painful to remember. Even if there was so much of himself he wanted to bury with the memories. 

“I can’t tell you the full extent of it, your father…”

“He doesn’t care enough to tell us.” Trunks sat up, disengaging himself from her left arm. “He’s too busy being a King.” 

Bulma sighed. She was going to have to find some middle ground. 

“I can’t tell you everything, but I can try to...to give you an idea.” Bulma looked at Bulla, then at Trunks. “But please, don’t go asking your father too directly after this, don’t accost him with questions right now…”

“Why not?” Trunks crossed his arms. “Don’t we deserve answers?” 

“Yes, you do...but some things are hard to face.” Bulma stood up. “Let’s sit on the sofa over there, and have some cocoa."

“They have cocoa here?” Bulla stood up with a jump. 

“If I learned something from my Namek experience...” Bulma took a Capsule from one of her many Capsule boxes, “...is to always come prepared to outer space journeys.” 

* * *

“I think he’s back, Sishou.” 

Cabba was probably avoiding his eyes. Vegeta could tell, even if he wasn’t looking. He would probably be uncomfortable, confused. How could Vegeta blame him, though. 

“I know.” Vegeta looked up from the notes on the old table. “I noticed Kakarot’s ki appearing with his.” 

“Goku?”

The presence of Kakarot’s ki had been too short for Cabba to notice it clearly, as he wasn’t used to how the Instant Transmission worked. 

“Yes, he comes here every day.” 

“Does he want in at the meetings? We could grant him a space, with some persuasion."

Vegeta’s hold on the pages faltered. 

Kakarot didn’t want to listen to endless political discussions. He wanted to be called in when decisions had been reached and he had instructions to decide on. He wanted to be told whether a fight was imminent or not. 

He came to the Palace to see Bulma, that was the simple response. 

He could feel their energies together and he assumed he was visiting. She needed company and if the clown could provide it, that was fine by him. Kami only knew why they were friends, but Vegeta had learned to accept the fact, as much as it puzzled him. 

He wished he could go and see her like Kakarot did. He wished to be free to roam like him, exploring the planet, meeting the people. Talking to his wife. 

But, as it stood, this was how things were. And if Kakarot was there to at least give Bulma some sense of safety, of company, he was silently thankful. Slightly jealous and annoyed, but thankful. 

He had already passed the threshold of feeling jealousy towards Kakarot in what concerned his friendship with Bulma, but he was jealous of the way in which he could be open and unabashed with her. 

As for Trunks...

“Leave my son be, we have other things to deal with.” Vegeta went back to his papers. “He should know better than to behave like a brat at his age.” 

“Maybe he…”

“ _Leave it._ ” 

Dealing with Trunks implied dealing with many things he had no time for at the moment. He couldn’t go through all that, not then and there. 

“Yes, Shishou.” 

Cabba turned to the papers at hand, giving his all to be useful, helpful and at his service. There was a time in which Vegeta would have believed that to be the expected norm, a result of his lineage and something to demand from Saiyans like Cabba. 

But in that room, years later and with many battles behind him, he had learned to feel the only thing that was truly fair, and Cabba understood so. 

He felt _grateful_. 

* * *

“Saiyans, as your father knew them, were different from these ones, in a way.” 

Bulma felt the warmth of the mug in her hands encouraging her to continue. Her children were silent, for once, which was a lot to say. If there was something Vegeta and her had in common was liking to have the last word, and both of their kids had inherited it. 

“You father’s Saiyan culture... _your_ Saiyan culture had very different events brand it,” she said, “first was that their planet... _this_ planet was destroyed, which prompted them to reelocate and…” Bulma sighed. “ _Conquer_ another one.” 

“You mean, it was inhabited?” Trunks frowned. “They just took over it?” 

“It was more complicated than that but, for the sake of this conversation, yes.” Bulma took a sip of cocoa. “There was a war later, between Saiyans and the locals, the Tuffles, which the Saiyans won and Planet Vegeta was born.” 

“The planet was named after dad?” Bulla asked, with a mustache of coca foam on her face. “Or was dad named after the planet?” 

“Also a tricky question.” Bulma wiped her daughter’s face with a napkin. “The planet was named after your grandfather, King Vegeta III, your father is Ve... _King_ Vegeta IV.” 

“Why isn’t Trunks ‘Vegeta V’?” Bulla looked at Trunks with confusion. 

“Because I had a say in it.” Bulma shivered. “In any case, the recounts of the conflict between the Saiyans and the Tuffles are a mixed bag, depending on who you ask, so I’d rather not discuss that.” 

“What do you mean a ‘mixed bag’?” Trunks frowned. “It sounds like colonialism to me, plain and simple.” 

“You mean like…” Bulla stalled. “Like they killed them for the planet?”

“In your father’s words, history claims that the Saiyans had been treated as slaves, the Tuffles that didn’t die stated the opposite...there is a blank in there somewhere because of _how_ the war was won.”

“They turned Super Saiyan?” Bulla guessed. 

“No, there were no Super Saiyans then, sweetheart...they had another more uncontrollable transformation, a scary one because they lose their reasoning when they do it...you see, Tuffles had an upper hand in technology, something those from this Universe do to.” 

Bulma assumed that it was another reason why her being tech-inclined and not a fighter wasn’t a good thing in the eyes of these Saiyans, even if they had coexisted with the Tuffles and not fought a war with them yet. 

There was a line between technology and warrior strength, it seemed, one that only armies like Frieza’s had breached, albeit in Frieza’s case with the takeover of remaining Tuffle tech as he conquered the Saiyans from Planet Vegeta. 

“So?” Trunks broke her reverie with a stern Vegeta-like demand. 

“So, the full moon arrived, and they all transformed into Oozaru, which is the reason why both of you haven’t been allowed to keep your Saiyan tails and something these Universe 6 Saiyans cannot do without them.” 

Bulma knew there were a million questions waiting for clarification after that, but the memory of Goku as a child losing his mind, transforming in the night and almost killing them all like he had his grandfather still haunted her sometimes. 

“The point is,” she said, stopping the questions from even forming in her children’s voices, “that not long after the war, Frieza came along…” 

At that, Bulma stalled again. 

What Trunks knew about Frieza was mostly accurate but limited. He knew about Frieza having been an enemy many times, also was aware of Future Trunks having defeated him once, and had an idea of his father’s resentment towards him, but not the full extent of what life under Frieza’s tyranny had meant to Vegeta. 

Bulla was mostly in the dark about him, only knowing he had been an enemy of theirs. 

Neither knew the part Beerus had played in the whole conflict either, and considering Bulla’s bizarre friendship with the God of Destruction, Bulma considered it best to leave that out for the moment. 

“Frieza is the descendant of another conquering Empire, if you will, but has been a lot more destructive and intent on Universe-domination than the Saiyans were.” Buma put her empty mug down. “His father, King Cold, was the one to get in contact with the Saiyans and had a military alliance with King Vegeta III…” 

“Military alliance? Like they were fighting partners?” Bulla took a cookie from the tin Bulma had brought in the same capsule. “Like dad and Goku?”

“Oh Kami, no.” Bulma shivered at the sole idea of having to compare Goku to King Cold. “It was more of a...an understanding for space conquests and the such...but King Cold soon gave command of operations to his son, Frieza, and then things went to shit.”

Bulla snorted at the use of the course language Bulma had _tried_ to use less of in her presence as she grew up. 

“Frieza did to the Saiyans what the Saiyans had done to the Tuffles?” Trunks took a cookie as well.

“No, love.” Bulma tried to find a way to word the next part as simply and painlessly as possible. “Frieza didn’t want to conquer the Saiyans or Planet Vegeta, he wanted them _gone._ ” 

“He destroyed the planet.” Trunks seemed to remember something, something he might have overheard and not paid much mind to at the time, nor think about the consequences of, while being just a nosy kid. 

“He killed your grandfather, Goten’s grandfather, destroyed the planet and every Saiyan who wasn’t away at the time.” Bulma paused. “And enslaved the ones left, including your father, who at the time was half the age you are now, sweetie,” she said to Bulla. 

Trunks’s expression changed. He seemed shocked. Bulma understood him completely. She had been just as shocked when finding out that Vegeta had been only 5 years old when his planet was destroyed. 

She had imagined for years, because of how Vegeta’s Saiyan pride was so intact, that he had grown up in the planet, that he had lived there for longer. She had found out much later, once Vegeta opened up more, that most of the knowledge of Saiyan culture he had, except for the few limited things he could remember, came from Nappa. 

“Saiyan pride has been, to your father, one of the few ways in which he could preserve at least something from the culture he was born in. 

“All of the people who had been with him, in the same situation, were gone, his brother not only far away but also knowing less about Saiyan culture than he does, and Goku never knew his parents or his planet of origin.” 

“But he never cared to teach us...to teach _me._ ” Trunks frowned. “He didn’t care for me to be his heir at all, nor does he care now...maybe because I’m not completely Saiyan.”

Bulma’s heart clenched at hearing that. That strain in his relationship with Vegeta needed to change. 

“I think it isn’t that, love.” She took Trunks’s hand in hers.“I think that explaining all of this to you requires a level of openness he’s never had before, not even with me.” 

“But you _know_ all this...”

“I’ve gathered bits and pieces that I put together through the years, and had a few conversations with him about them, but we haven’t talked about it all openly, and I never insisted much on it because it’s not my place.” 

She frowned. 

“He should tell you, though, because it’s _your_ history too.” She smiled. “And Bulla, when she’s older.” 

She hugged both her children tightly until they complained to be let go. 

As they left for their rooms, Bulla waited for Trunks to walk ahead and returned to Bulma momentarily, a worried frown on her face. 

“What would happen if dad had other kids?” She whispered hesitantly. “Other kids who are fully Saiyan?”

Bulma was shocked at that. She couldn’t understand how such a scenario had come to her daughter unprompted. 

“For that to happen, they’d need to have another mother,” Bulma said, crouching to Bulla’s height, “someone who isn’t me.”

“I know, that’s why I’m asking,” Bulla said, frowning at her mother’s obvious answer, “I overheard some Saiyans talking about it, about how the King should take a Saiyan wife, to have true Saiyan children who would stay when we leave.”

Bulma felt the statement like a dagger, cold and sharp, being plunged into her gut. She had never felt her loneliness, her lack of proximity to Vegeta, as intently as in that moment. It had been so long since the last time she was left alone enough to entertain doubts. 

“We’ll see what your dad has to say to that.” Bulma kissed her daughter’s forehead trying to showcase more certainty and confidence that she was actually feeling.

How had her family changed so much in such a short period of time? 

* * *

_Bulla stomped towards the kitchen and opened the fridge with so much force that the door came out of its hinges._

_“Holy shit, kid.” Trunks, who had been sitting on the table while scrolling through a tablet, looked at her in alarm. “What the fuck?”_

_“Language...” Bulma warned as she entered the room, just before noticing that Bulla was holding the door in her hand “...what the fuck!”_

_Bulla looked at the door with the fiercest scowl she could muster, as if it had been that object who had personally offended her. She sighed and leaned the door on the side of the fridge, trying not to drop the bottles and containers that were lined on the inside. Still, some of them fell and crashed loudly on the kitchen floor._

_“Fuck,” she said, just like the other two, almost inaudibly._

_Trunks got up in a rush, leaving his tablet behind, and placed the door better before starting to pick up pieces of glass. Upon noticing Bulla was shoe-less, he picked her up with one arm and sat her on the counter._

_“Is there a particular reason why you’re woman-handling the fridge like that, young lady?” Bulma asked, coming closer to assess the damage on the hinges._

_“I’m mad.”_

_“I can very well tell.” Bulma frowned, severely. “I’ll need either a better excuse or a heartfelt apology, though, we have rules on being tough on the electronics in this house.”_

_“Ask dad, it’s his fault.”_

_Trunks looked at her with a combination of disbelief and awe. He was always a lot less confrontational with Vegeta, and Bulla couldn’t, for a good portion of her life, understand why they saw their father so differently. She got to understand in time, though._

_Bulla was able to be more demanding with Vegeta, but she also didn’t have the respect Trunks had from him, regarding certain things. Trunks wanted what she had, and she wanted what Trunks had, and none had what they wanted._

_“What’s going on?” Vegeta asked, leaning on the doorframe with a towel on his neck._

_“Your daughter broke my fridge and told me to ask you why she did it.”_

_“It wasn’t on purpose, it was a direct consequence of being angry with dad,” Bulla explain, although she thought it was obvious._

_Maybe her mom was just playing the fool to lighten up the mood. It didn’t work._

_Vegeta sighed._

_“Princess…”_

_“Don’t call me that,” Bulla said, setting her most intense frown towards her father._

_The silence was sharp enough to cut as profusely as the glass Trunks was disposing of._

_“Alright, you two sweaty butts,” Bulma said, crouching in front of the fridge to look at where the door had been ripped cleanly off, “tell me what this is about so we can fix it, and then I can go and also fix this.”_

_“Bulla is overreacting.” Vegeta’s voice was stern but not devoid of worry._

_It made Bulla want to rip off more doors._

_“I am not!” She jumped down from the counter with more force than necessary. “You are being unfair!”_

_“It’s not like I’m not training you properly!” Vegeta shouted back._

_“Look me in the face and tell me you didn’t train Trunks differently when he was my age!” Bulla’s tone escalated even higher._

_“Alright!” Bulma, of course, could scream the loudest. “Can we speak in a human tone, please?!”_

_“I wonder if Goku would let me live in their house if I asked…” Trunks muttered._

_“I would fly there and bring your ass home immediately, boy,” Vegeta threatened._

_“YOU SEE?!” Bulla began shouting again._ _“THAT’S WHAT I MEAN!!”_

_“Can we just…!”_

_Bulma turned from her position on the floor as she spoke, but the moment she placed her palm on the floor, a wayward piece of glass cut through her hand._

_“Shit…” she muttered, as a noticeable amount of blood dripped from her hand._

_“Mom!” Trunks turned to her immediately, helping her get up and placing her hand below the faucet._

_“Bulma!” Vegeta took a step towards them but she stopped him with a stare._

_“I’m fine!” She let Trunks help her clean the wound and carefully pull the piece of glass out from her palm. “Continue your conversation and, for the love of everything you care for, do it without screaming.”_

_Bulla and Vegeta, who were both looking at her with concern, turned towards each other._

_“You are holding back on me,” Bulla said, lowering her tone, “and I can tell.”_

_Vegeta remained silent and the noise of water cleaning Bulma’s hand seemed louder in the midst of that awkwardness._

_“When Trunks was 8 he was already fusing with Goten and fighting evil people.” Bulla didn’t know the specifics but she knew enough to argue. “I’m 10 and you won’t even push me enough to hurt at all.”_

_“I sure hope we’re never overheard by paparazzi…” Bulma muttered as Trunks retrieved the medical kit from the bathroom in a split second._

_“There aren’t extenuating circumstances now, there isn’t a need for you to train with the intensity Trunks required to survive back then.” Vegeta continued scowling, arms crossed._

_“So am I supposed to believe that, had the Earth not being in danger, you would have coddled Trunks as much as you cuddle me?”_

_Trunks snorted while bandaging Bulma’s hand and looked away the moment Vegeta pinned him with a stare._

_“Is it because I’m a girl?”_

_Bulma and Trunks stopped fussing with the bandage and looked up towards Vegeta. With every member of the family waiting for his answer, he seemed more flustered than Bulla had seen him in a long while._

_“...no,” he responded, hesitantly._

_“I sure fucking hope it’s not.” Bulma added, frowning._

_Trunks seemed visibly uncomfortable and like he wanted to bolt from the conversation. Bulla assumed that he was thinking the opposite, he was wondering why their father hadn’t coddled him as he did Bulla. But she assumed he was old enough to ask that himself, whenever he wanted, and their father had enough confrontation for one day._

_“Why is it, then?” she insisted._

_Vegeta sighed, sitting down with a thud._

_“It’s not you, Bulla,” he muttered, not looking at her._

_Bulla’s anger dissipated a bit upon seeing her father like that, crouched in his seat, so vulnerable._

_Bulma put her arm around Trunks and guided him away._

_“Come on, kid,” she said, walking towards the door, “let’s leave these two alone to talk while you help you favorite parent prepare spare parts to fix the fridge.”_

_Vegeta looked up from his position to frown at Bulma, but she winked playfully as they walked out of the room. Trunks didn’t look back and Bulla wondered if there was some truth in that statement, if Trunks really felt that way._

_Bulla took a chair and sat across her father, still keeping enough space to remain assertive._

_“When you say it’s not me…” Bulla prodded, carefully, “you mean it’s about you?”_

_Vegeta sighed and met her eyes. He seemed worried and somewhat afraid._ _Maybe even regretful._

_“I wasn’t the same man when Trunks was 8 years old,” he said._

_“What do you mean?”_

_“I...I hadn’t learned yet certain things, about myself and about the meaning of family...” he continued, “...I was a lot tougher with Trunks because I hadn’t yet figured out what it meant, what it truly meant, for me to lose him.”_

_Bulla was taken aback. She had never quite linked sparring and training with death. Even if there was pain in it, to some extent, it was more like a game for Bulla than something life threatening. If she got hurt while training it was as if she’d fallen from a bike or scratched her knees while attempting to climb a tree, they were consequences of attempting something fun, not battle scars from avoiding death._

_Death also had, for Bulla a different meaning than she assumed it did to her family, who had faced it in several occasions. Death for her was a subject of discussion with one of her favorite people, a purple God of Destruction who visited her once in a while, ever since he had become her unlikely babysitter._

_“You’re not gonna kill me for training, dad,” she explained, matter-of-factly, “we’re both strong enough for that to never happen.”_

_Vegeta looked at her with awe, as if she had said something unbelievable._

_It was true though. He was strong enough to know when to stop and she was strong enough to know her limits._

_“If I really feel like I’m not gonna be able to go on, I’ll tell you,” she continued, “and if you think I_ can _continue, even if I say I can’t, you’ll know and you’ll be able to tell when to push me further.”_

_She reached out, touching his hand._

_“I trust you enough, so why can’t you trust me?”_

_Vegeta took her hand in his and squeezed it._

_“I’ll try my best, Princess…” He stalled. “Am I allowed to call you that again?”_

_“Yes, dad.”_

_Bulla smiled, hugging him, thinking that this time it was her dad who needed to feel safe._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The title of this chapter is from the song [Queendom by Aurora](https://open.spotify.com/playlist/1OAnG5DcGEpU4b426VTrEP), from the playlist that accompanied me while writing this fic.


	3. I'm not the man I used to be, tonight it's here for everyone to see, I will be king

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Chi Chi shares her undisclosed guilt and Bulma helps Vegeta understand why he deserves a crown.

“You should ask Bulma if she brought along any more food supplies, because you lot are extinguishing it faster than I can cook it.” 

Chi Chi finished rinsing the last plate and put it down on the makeshift counter 

“And, to be honest, I don’t know if I’m willing to risk it on local hunts.”

She felt Goku’s arms around her waist and his chin on her shoulder. He sighed. He was tense, worried, and she could feel it in his warmth. 

“Is everything ok?”She placed a hand over his on her stomach. 

“I think everyone’s scared,” he mumbled, “of what Vegeta’s thinking.” 

“And what _is_ he thinking?”

“I don’t know...I trust him but...I think he’s carrying a very heavy burden with this.” 

“If I take my father as an example and multiply it by 100, which seems to be like an approximate comparison of how strict the Saiyan life is, then I get an idea of _why_ he’d be taking it all too seriously.” 

Goku remained silent. He held onto her tighter, his nose buried in the crook of her neck. 

“Chi…” His voice was soft, hesitant. “How are _you_ feeling here?”

There was some doubt in his tone, as if he was treading carefully. 

“It’s…” She closed her eyes, frowning. “It’s like...an overwhelming amount of context.”

Goku let her go, his warmth removed from her back. 

“What do you mean?” 

She turned to find him frowning, in that particular way he did when he was trying to follow her train of thought but was utterly lost. She sighed, leaning back towards the counter. 

“I spent a good portion of our marriage trying to change us.” She avoided his gaze. “I attempted to be the ideal wife I thought I had to be, demanding you to be the husband I thought you ought to be, wanting Gohan to be the son I expected him to be.” 

Goku took a chair from the table they had eaten in and sat directly across from her, listening intently. He didn’t speak, he didn’t ask anything, he just looked and listened. 

“I tried desperately to remove fighting from our lives, because it was…” She felt her heart accelerating, saying it all out loud. “It turned into an expectation, you know? That you would always be the ultimate defense, the one and only savior of the Earth.”

She distracted her eyes with the ground, the table, her hands skimming the rough surface of the rocky counter. 

“It was always _you_ they’d call, it became so expected for you to be there that it was as if you were duty-bound to put your life on the line for the world, and then Gohan’s...I found out later that you also noticed that, and your solution was to die _for good._ ”

She laughed, but there was sadness and self-pity in the sound.

“After Cell, I thought you weren’t coming back...we all did.” She swallowed a sob. “And then I found out about Goten.” 

Goku didn’t speak, he didn’t interrupt and she didn’t attempt to look at him for a reaction. 

“I was crushed, devastated, I didn’t know how I’d do it, but I knew that if Gohan saw me crying, he’d stop everything, he’d put _his own life_ on pause to help me, and I didn’t want that.” 

She sighed. 

“So I swallowed my grief and I thought that maybe after your sacrifice and with Gohan finding his own path, I could raise this kid to be just a _kid_ , free from war.” 

She shrunk on herself, ashamed. 

“I could just never mention fighting, I could ask Gohan to avoid it in front of him, I could just...not tell him the whole story, and he’d maybe grow to be a child whose fate wouldn’t be determined by enemies and combat…” 

Chi Chi smiled, sadness and regret still on her face. 

“And then, Goten was born...and he looked _so much like you._ ” She could feel the tears but was unable to stop them. “It hurt so much knowing that you wouldn’t get to meet him, and my resolve faltered, because I started feeling that not mentioning fighting would mean steering him away from your memory...from _you._ ” 

She dried the tears with the back of her hand, upset at herself and her own inability to be firm. 

“He was so very little when I completely changed my mind, when I finally _understood,_ ” she explained, “I was drying dishes, just like now, and saw him through the kitchen window, having so recently learned to walk, wobbling about and attempting to kick down a tree.” 

She smiled at the memory, through the tears and the shame. 

“He kicked it badly, fell and got hurt.” Chi Chi could remember it as if it had been in that very kitchen. “And I realized that I couldn’t take that part away from him, just like I never could with you or Gohan, and that if I pretended it didn’t exist, he would get to it anyway, but his ignorance of it would get him hurt.” 

Chi Chi turned, her back to her husband, still unable to face him. Out of guilt, shame, fear of losing him. 

"I talked to Bulma about it, I figured she'd know more than anyone else...I mean she was alone when Trunks was born and all…" 

Chi Chi had formed a friendship with Bulma, a _true_ friendship, only then. Without Goku there, without her jealousy and confusion about their friendship, she realized there were things she could only share with someone who had lived through the same she had. The mother of a Saiyan baby whose father was gone.

"She told me about her theories concerning Saiyan history, and I realized that all that time I had been trying—” 

Chi Chi paused, swallowing a sob. Goku remained silent, she was still turning her back to him, not wanting to see his face, scared of seeing the disappointment she had spent years fearing that would eventually materialize. 

“I realized I had been trying to suppress an inherent part of my kids...a part of _you._ ” 

She inhaled and exhaled deeply before continuing.

“Bulma reassured me, she told me that I shouldn’t blame myself, that it was reasonable to expect you to be...an Earthling.” She crossed her arms to stop herself from shaking. “Anyway, I just decided I’d do something about it.” 

Chi Chi turned, slightly, slowly, still not looking at her husband. 

“I decided to train Goten myself, so that Gohan could continue doing what he was doing in school, figuring out who he was without you, as we all were.” She smiled sadly. “And the more Goten grew, looking so much like you, the more I taught him and trained him and found my footing in battle again, the more I wondered...how much you must have _hated_ me.”

She couldn’t stop the tears, streaming down her eyes, but her voice remained firm, she _had_ to continue talking. 

“When we came here, it’s like everything fit into place.” She dried the tears once more. “I saw the world that made you, I understood how much you fit in, how much I was trying to take away from you...and I realized that it wasn’t just that Goten looked so much like you, _you_ are so much like _Goten._ ”

Chi Chi finally looked up, found her husband’s eyes, braced herself for whatever his reaction would be. 

“You were like Goten, you had a father, a mother, an older brother, and it was all taken away from you, so fast and so cruelly you don’t even remember what you lost and the only thing left of it inside you, the Saiyan blood running through you...I tried to force it out of you...you must _hate_ me.”

She felt his hands on her arms, and let herself be drawn to him. He was always so gentle, and she tended to wonder how someone so strong could also be so soft. 

Goku carefully led her to sit on his lap, caressed her cheek with his hand and guided her to look him in the eyes again. 

“That’s twice now that you’ve said it, Chi.” His voice was soft, private. “I’m starting to think that you really believe that.” 

Chi Chi’s tears kept going and she bit her lip, shaking slightly with the silent truth that she’d been holding onto for decades. The notion that Goku resented her and would be happier anywhere else but beside her. 

And that she _deserved_ it. 

“You can’t be serious.” Goku frowned. “How long have you felt this way?” 

Her silence spoke more than she could have done herself. 

“Chi Chi, I don’t hate you, I could _never_ hate you…”

“But maybe you should.”

“ _No._ ” 

“Maybe...maybe you should stay...maybe you should have here the life you deserved to have, the Saiyan life you were born to…”

“I don’t want that, Chi.” He shook his head. “I don’t even know what it means to be Saiyan, I don’t…” 

He stopped, fumbling for words. Goku was emotionally eloquent, incredibly sensitive, but also clumsy when it came to translating feelings into words. 

“The first time I ever had a family, a _real_ family, it was because you gave it to me, Chi Chi.” 

She gasped. He had never said that to her before. But it couldn’t be completely true, he had…

“But your grandfather…”

“I was too young when I lost him to have really understood what it meant to have a home.” He took her hand, caressed its back with his thumb. “I loved him and I remember him fondly, but I didn’t understand back then the concept of a home or a family and...I lost him before I could.”

There was so much pain in those words, so many truths that they both knew and didn’t speak. 

“But with you, I had a place to belong to, somewhere to come back to, a refuge I never had before.” He leaned his forehead onto hers. “I know I was never the perfect husband, and that there’s so much we stumbled on when we had no idea of what we were doing, but I wouldn’t change it, Chi.” 

She sighed, relaxing in his proximity, his energy enveloping her protectively. 

"I love you, Chi Chi, please don't ever doubt that." 

She leaned tentatively and kissed him softly, his hands holding her waist securely, gently. 

"I love you too." 

She leaned her head on his shoulder, enveloped by his embrace. 

"My home is where you are, Chi." His lips drew the words on her ear. "And I'll always come back to you." 

* * *

Bulma was typing endless codes into a blue screen when she heard the doors of the lab. The guards were surely gone by then and she guessed, by how late it was, that her daughter had insomnia, like she did sometimes back home. 

"Sweetheart, you should be sleeping…" 

She pressed 'enter' and swiveled her chair around, but instead of her daughter’s stubborn pout, she was confronted with her husband’s just as stubborn frown. 

"Oh...it's you." 

"It's nice to see you too." 

Vegeta crossed his arms, defiant. She did _not_ have time for this. 

"Wow, sarcasm." She turned back around, towards the screen. “Lovely.” 

"We haven't seen each other in _weeks._ "

"I am aware." Her typing sounded deafening with the echo of the makeshift lab.

"And yet it seems like you'd rather _not_ see me."

Bulma sighed. Exhausted. And _annoyed_.

"What is it, Vegeta?" She turned around again, her chair making a strangled sound with the sudden movement. "Are you here to ask me to reprimand Trunks for his 'behavior'?" 

"No, but you'd do well on not referring to it with such little care…"

She didn't let him finish the thought.

"Is it to urge me to finish the ship faster? Like the Gravity Machine back at Capsule Corp.?"

"What? No, I…" 

"Are you here to inform me about the second wife thing? Because I'd rather hear that from you than from my daughter."

"The _what_?!" Vegeta uncrossed his arms, his eyes opened in shock. "What are you even _talking_ about?!"

"That thing in which your people expect you to take a Saiyan wife to fix the mess." 

"What mess?"

"Me, Trunks, Bulla…" She looked at him in the eyes. "You know, your _mistakes._ " 

Vegeta remained surprisingly silent. His face went from shock and anger to confusion and then settled in a serious, neutral stance that Bulma assumed he had been perfecting as of late. A sort of monarchist neutrality, a severe coldness that hid emotional turmoil. 

She wondered if he remembered that from his own father. 

“You really think that I would do that?” He asked, cold and distant. “And that I would not tell you if I was even considering it?” 

Bulma stalled. His calmness was unfamiliar. It wasn’t the heat of arguments they had walked through to get there, the known retorts and silly comebacks. It was different, it felt...uncaring. 

“I’m sorry.” She sighed, reclining on the chair. “I didn’t mean to be unfair, I’m just...I just feel...we _all_ feel…”

“What?” 

“Inadequate.” She settled on. “The three of us feel _inadequate_. And I guess that and the prolonged silence between us has made me more...prone to accepting stuff like that as potential truths.” 

“We’ve been apart longer than this before.” He frowned, still serious, still cold. “We’ve been apart for longer and in worse circumstances, in different planets even, in different planes of existence…”

“It’s not the same, Vegeta.”

“Why not?” 

“You wouldn’t understand...”

“ _I wouldn’t understand_?” His newfound coldness was melting through the cracks of his anger. “I wouldn’t understand what it means to feel _inadequate_? Is that what you’re telling me?”

Bulma should have shouted back. It was what they did. Instead she looked in his eyes and found the pain seeping through his mask of duty. 

“We don’t want to hold you back.” Bulma leaned her head on her hands, her eyes closed. “We don’t want to ruin this for you.” 

“I never said you were ruining anything…”

“You don’t have to!” Bulma looked up again, her hair a mess, her eyes bloodshot and tired. “I’m relegated to a room, tinkering with machines everyone here looks at with disgust.” She stood up “Your son is feeling weak, unimportant, cut off from Goten and then pushed away from whatever it is you’re doing because he’s not _Saiyan enough_ …”

“That’s not…” 

“Your daughter is crying her eyes out because she thinks she’s not as strong as she should be and expecting to be replaced with _true Saiyan children._ ” 

Vegeta avoided her eyes, settling on the floor instead. 

“We’re being treated by everyone like mistakes and your silence only serves to make us feel they’re _right._ ” 

That silence, Vegeta’s silence, enveloped them then. 

Bulma couldn’t tell if she had gone too far, but she was tired of tiptoeing around him and his issues. She needed answers, she needed certainties, she needed to know if she had to fix the ship sooner rather than later because they were no longer a part of his life, now that he had the one he always wanted. 

She needed to know if they were the collateral damage of the best second chance possible for someone whose true destiny had been stolen at age 5. 

Vegeta, though, didn’t speak. He didn’t look at her. His body, once stern and defiant turned shaky and unstable. He fell to his knees right in front of her, like a defeated enemy she had just beaten to a pulp.

He had been hurt, tortured and murdered and he had never looked more helpless than he did then, kneeling in front of her, in her lab, among the wreckage of her ship. 

“Vegeta!” She run to him, kneeling. 

He was shaking, his eyes were shut close and his arms remained tense at his sides. 

“Vegeta, look at me.” She took his face with her coarse, work-bruised hands. 

His eyes were shut but the tears were streaming still. He was breathing in gasps, as if he was in physical pain. Bulma recognized it all from the first nights, back when Trunks was still a baby and they were still two lost comets colliding by chance. 

She knew what to do. 

“Vegeta, listen to me,” she whispered, unclasping his cape and letting it fall on the dirty lab floor. 

Her hands moved to his shoulders, motioning him to sit down. He was pliable and soft like this. Unrecognizable. He went where she guided, even if he didn’t show any sign indicating that he was listening to her. 

She sat with her back on a wall, leaned his head on her chest, and started breathing slowly. 

“Breathe with me, Vegeta.” 

She counted the inhales and exhales, his head moving as her chest did. Even if he didn’t hear her, he could feel her and his body would follow along in autopilot. He needed to stop hyperventilating. She knew this was the priority. 

It took some minutes for him to regain a rhythm, even more for him to stop shaking. She remained silent, just breathing, and he eventually held her waist, leaning his head on the crook of her neck and inhaling deeply. 

“I never told you the truth because the method works anyway,” he said, softly, his face hidden from her view, “but what helps the most isn’t the breathing thing.” 

“If you tell me it’s my breasts, I swear…” 

“I’m not the pervy old man.” He hid his face further. “No, it’s your ki.” 

“But you can feel that anyway.” 

“Yeah but...it’s stronger when I’m closer.” He moved a hand to the space slightly underneath her clavicle. “It’s harder to sense your ki because you’re not trained, but the closer I am to your center, the more clearly I can sense it.” 

“Is that why you’re so clingy when you sleep?” 

“I got used to associating your ki with...with being _safe._ ” 

Bulma was speechless. 

Vegeta wasn’t the sensitive type, but he was incredibly and unabashedly sincere. 

She had found this the most unexpected and unsettling quality to get used to while being with him, and realized upon their time together how much she had been surrounded by men who were not sincere, not honest, with very few exceptions. Most often than not, the exceptions were men who didn’t have ulterior motives, like Goku, Krillin and Piccolo. 

And to Bulma, those honest sentences, uttered without the intention to gain something from her, but being true and from the heart, were the ones that made her breathless and unable to respond. 

“I missed you too, asshole.” It wasn’t her best response, but he expected exactly that. 

His embrace tightened as she caressed his hair and his back. 

“I’m terrified, Bulma.” 

“Of what?” 

“Of everything.” 

She still couldn’t see his face but he probably wanted it that way 

“Of having finally this task I was born to do but failing at it, of losing what I have accomplished instead of this, losing you, losing my children and, more than anything…” 

He inhaled deeply and let it out, like a curse he was trying to get rid of. 

“I’m terrified of being like my father.” 

Bulma’s hands stilled. Her brain short-circuited with that information. 

As long as she had known him, Bulma considered that Vegeta admired his father above anyone else. He was his guiding north, the embodiment of Saiyan pride and duty. The King he had been born to become but was robbed of following. 

Vegeta, since she met him, had carried the mantle of a race, a mantle his father had put over him, and she expected this chance to be the dream opportunity to do that. 

“If I’d known that was what it took for you to shut up, I would have told you a while ago.”

He was deflecting. But she allowed it. 

“I am going to need you to elaborate, I hope you’re aware of that,” she said. 

Vegeta sighed and sat up in front of her on the floor, yet still with his eyes lost on the ground beneath him. He set his hands on his knees, fidgeting, nervous. 

“When Trunks came into the meeting, demanding to go to the lower class sectors, we had an argument.” 

“I gathered…”

“He got angry, threw a tantrum in front of the Sadala Army and flew out of a window, running away.” Vegeta closed his eyes. “And the first thing I thought, the first thing that came to my mind, was _relief._ ”

Bulma crossed her arms, silent. She wanted to let him explain before jumping to conclusions. 

“I was relieved that he had left and had let me work, as if he was a nuisance I had gotten rid of through the harsher words I could find, and immediately I felt this pressing anguish of utmost _guilt._ ” 

He covered his face with his hands, breathing deeply. 

“I was terrified of myself, Bulma.” His voice was small. “I was disgusted and terrified that I’d want my son gone, because I would die for him, I _died_ for him and I’d do it again...I’d kill anyone who dares to harm him…” 

Vegeta looked up again, with tears in his eyes and a haunted expression. 

“And then I remembered my father,” he sentenced, defeated, “I remembered that my father had done the exact same thing.” 

Bulma took his hand in hers, encouragingly. 

“I had never seen my father’s choices in any other way than fair, unavoidable and King-like,” he continued, “when he sent Tarble away so young because he was weak, when he gave me to Frieza...I didn’t question it, I thought…” 

He bit his lip, shook his head in an attempt to clear it. 

“I thought, later today, that if I did to my children what my father did to us, I wouldn’t be able to live with myself.” 

He grasped Bulma’s hand. 

“I would die rather than give Trunks away to a monster, I would die rather than send Bulla away because of power levels, before separating them from each other and from _you_ …”

“I know.” 

“I felt so disgusted by my own thoughts, by my inability to care for them properly, and I started questioning…” 

“Your own father.” she completed for him. 

“I don’t hate him for what he did, I don’t...I can’t blame him for everything but…”

“You have a different opinion on how to raise your own kids, I’d say that’s a positive thing.” 

“I still fucked up.” 

“I mean, we both fuck up…” 

“No but, I think I...I think I did... _permanently._ ” 

“Vegeta, I know that you really care about what Bulla thinks of you but she’ll be fine if you just talk to her…”

“I don’t mean Bulla.” 

Oh. Oh, that was new. 

“You...you mean Trunks.” 

He remained silent. 

“You think Trunks hates you.” 

It wasn’t a question. 

“Vegeta, Trunks doesn’t hate you.” 

“I have a more honest relationship with the other Trunks...with _Cabba_ than I do with him.” 

“You have trained and spent more time with Trunks than with either of them.” 

“But he doesn’t know me...he doesn’t really know me, the worst parts of me, the _true_ parts of me.” 

“Then you should tell him.”

“I can’t.”

“Why not?”

“Because then I’d _lose_ him!” 

He sighed, defeated. 

“I’m not Kakarot, Bulma, I’m not the undisputed savior of the Earth, I can’t...if I tell him the truth, he’d never look at me the same way again.” 

“You’re not giving him enough credit.” She caressed his cheek. “He’s smarter than you think...he got that from me.” 

He half smiled. It was faint, but it was there, and Bulma counted it as a win. 

“Vegeta, do you know why you’re a good King to these people right now?” She guided his face towards hers. “Why they need _you_ specifically?”

He frowned, unbelieving and confused. 

“Because their former one died childless.” 

“I’m serious, Vegeta.” She sighed, letting him go. “They requested you specifically, from another whole Universe, I had to make a freaking ship that could transport us all the way here without Whis intervening.” 

She avoided mentioning the fact that said ship was now in pieces because of how much power she had used and how unstable the core had been and she refused to request help from Whis to fix it. But that wasn’t the point at that moment. 

“Cabba asked for me,” Vegeta stated, “he requested my help because they were a kingdom without a King and I was a King with no kingdom.” 

“But what makes you a _good_ King? A King worth all this Universe-hopping mess?” She crossed her arms, defiant. “Is it your blood? Your lineage? That doesn’t quite mean much here, in all truth.”

“They _do_ respect similar protocols…”

“Still, it seems like a lot of fuss to bring you specifically just because you were born with your lineage, especially considering your father was a King in another Universe with a different history than this one.”

Vegeta remained silent. He looked at the floor again but this time he was thinking, considering options. 

“I assume you’d be now thinking that maybe it was your power levels,” she continued, “which would be kind of ridiculous, considering that I love you and all but you’re not, objectively, the most powerful Saiyan in all the Universes…”

“Hey!”

“I mean it, Vegeta, you’re powerful, more powerful than any native, but if you, Goku and Broly were put in a fight against each other, could you objectively tell me you _would_ win against _both_?” 

He remained silent, but this time with a weight on his shoulders. 

“And, in the event of that happening, do your think they would give the crown to Goku or Broly?” 

“Hell, no.”

“Why is that?”

“You think _Kakarot_ is reasonable enough to rule a kingdom?”

Bulma smirked sufficiently. 

“You Saiyans are _so_ one-dimensional.” 

She repeated the words she had once said, in another Universe. She leaned on the wall behind her, still looking at her husband. 

“Everything’s one category at a time with you, it’s just power levels, just bloodline, just class rank...that’s not how the world works... _any_ world, for that matter.” 

“Enlighten me, then.” Vegeta huffed. “What is it that _I_ have, since I’m so _weak_ and _irrelevant_?”

“Wow, dramatic much?” She laughed. “I never said you were any of those things.”

He sneered. And, at least, he wasn’t shaking anymore. 

“Answer me another question,” she continued, “do you think you would have been a proper King if they had gone looking for you back when we were in Namek, let’s say, or when you first came to Earth?” 

“My power levels weren’t…”

“Can we please, for a whole minute, _stop_ with the power levels.” She sighed. “Let’s pretend you had the same power levels, or that, at least, you were stronger than any Saiyan in this planet.” 

He crossed his arms and frowned in thought. 

“Let’s imagine Namek, you were stronger in Namek than on Earth already so let’s go with that.” She looked him in the eye. “Let’s imagine you’re there in Namek, just arrived, and Cabba or whoever from the Sadala Army shows up unexpectedly and tells you they want you to come here to rule a King-less Saiyan society.” 

“What about Frieza?”

“Fuck Frieza.” She groaned. “Who cares about Frieza?” 

“Your lack of common sense towards Frieza as a threat during these years has been both outstandingly reckless and arousingly admiring.” 

“Flattery won’t get you out of this conversation because _I have a point._ ”

“So you keep saying...”

She kicked him in the arm from her position on the floor, a hit that was no less than a tickle for him, but it silenced him, at least. 

“You’re in Namek, Frieza is minding his own bullshit, Krillin and Gohan are looking for the Dragon Balls, my hot bod is getting possessed by an asshole, all’s the same except that you get visited by a Universe 6 Saiyan and proposed the same thing they proposed this time around. 

“You haven’t met me, aside from seeing me from afar and lusting for me in your dreams…”

“You’re making _a lot_ of assumptions.” 

She ignored him. 

“We didn’t have our kids, your goal is immortality, power and pride, you want a way out of Frieza, you have nothing to lose and everything to gain.” She looked at him in the eyes. “You would have undoubtedly said yes.” 

“I mean, immortality was _right there_ though…” 

“Vegeta, for the love of everything you care for, look me in the eyes and tell me you wouldn’t have accepted.” 

He remained silent but they both knew she was right. 

“Do you think that, if that had been the case, you would have been as proper a King as you are now?” She leaned towards him slightly, not breaking eye contact. “Can you swear to me that you would have been just as good for this position if they had called upon you then?”

After some seconds of silence that stretched for what seemed hours, he finally responded. 

“It would have been easier to make choices.” He sighed. “But they would have been the wrong ones…” He opened his eyes wide in realization. “They would have been _my father’s_ choices.” 

His father’s choices of invading another planet, of fighting war on the Tuffles, of subduing an entire world for their gain after having lost their own planet through internal conflict. His father’s choices of becoming subservient to a crushing totalitarian power and delivering his children to the hands of cruel fates and separation. 

She smirked sufficiently, cocking her head. She _loved_ being right. 

“What makes you a great King isn’t your rank, your lineage or your power level,” Bulma stated, as if it was the most obvious thing in both Universes to see, because it _was_ , for her at least, “you are a great King because of what you’ve _learned_ , Vegeta.” 

He looked at her in that way he did sometimes, as if she had just illuminated an entire path for him that he hadn’t seen before. As if she had delivered him from some heavy, ancient burden. 

“You’re the most insufferably brilliant person I’ve ever met.” His voice was soft, in awe.

“It’s not like you didn’t know this already, you just like to ignore the obvious sometimes.” She leaned back on the wall again. “Which is great, because I love pointing it out, so we make a good team.” 

His expression changed, from awe to something different. He frowned in thought, his eyes lost somewhere else. 

“What? What did I say?” 

“You’re _brilliant_!” He stood up with a jump. 

“We’ve established that…”

“Tomorrow morning I’ll pick you up, you’ll come with me to the strategy meeting.”

“ _WHAT_?!” 

“You just...be ready, I’ll come for you.”

“I don’t have all that…” she said, pointing at him all encompassing, “Saiyan gear thing.”

“That’s alright, just go with your lab clothes.” 

“I’m gonna repeat myself here but... _what_?!” 

He picked up his cape from the floor and adjusted it, after which he promptly started walking towards the door with a purpose and confidence that seemed to have returned in a burst of realization. 

When he was about to get there though, he turned around and flew towards her, as she was getting up from the floor. He caught her in midair and kissed the breath out of her. She was shocked, her hands barely grasping his shoulders, but he held her firmly by the waist. 

He settled her on the ground again delicately, and kissed her once more, softly, lingering. 

“My _Queen_ ,” he whispered, before darting back towards the door with the same speed. 

He was gone before she could even remember how to breathe again.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The title of this chapter is from the song [King by Saint PHNX](https://open.spotify.com/playlist/1OAnG5DcGEpU4b426VTrEP), from the playlist that accompanied me while writing this fic.


	4. Take a bow for the bad decisions that we made

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Vegeta has much needed conversations with his children (and with Goku).

Trunks heard a pounding on his door that sounded more like someone was trying to open a hole through it than an actual knock. He groaned dramatically, cursing the entire Sadala Army inwardly. _Mostly_ inwardly. 

He got up clumsily, almost tripping with the sheets and opened the door before the deafening knocks started again. 

“What?” 

He was too sleepy to make it sound as threatening as he would have wanted it to. Which was fortunate, considering the one standing on the other side of the door wasn’t a guard. 

His father’s stern face cut through the sleepiness of his brain like a bucket of cold water. 

“Dad?” 

He questioned for a bit if he wasn’t still dreaming. 

“Let me in, boy.” 

Trunks couldn’t quite make out, in his foggy mind, why he was meant to be angry at his father, but he remembered he ought to. 

He let him come in, while the image of a shattered window, a flight through the planet and the weight of Goten’s hand on is on a mountain all came to him, with increasing clarity and in an overwhelming speed. 

Oh, yeah. That. 

“Isn't it possible for you to be less messy?” 

Vegeta looked around the room, assessing the sheets, the clothes strewn about, the disarray of the closed capsules his mother had given him. 

“Did you want something specific, dad?” Trunks ran his fingers through his hair, exhausted. “Or is it just general criticism you’re here for?” 

He wasn’t normally that snappy with his father, but since arriving, his patience had ran thin incredibly fast. Goten tended to, most often than not, act as a sort of auxiliary conscience, but being apart from him was starting to affect him more than he thought it would. 

Vegeta sighed, taking off his cape, draping it over the bed and sitting in the end of it. 

“We need to talk.” 

Trunks let himself fall, surrendering to sit on a nearby armchair, his pajama pants and battered grunge tshirt a stark contrast to his father’s royal garb. 

“I’ve been talking to your mother…” 

That was, normally, an opening Trunks dreaded. It meant, most often than not, ‘what you did was so fucked up, your mother asked me to intervene’. Now, though, at least it implied that he had _seen_ his mom, which was _something_. If it was at the expense of him getting in trouble, at least it was worth it. 

“She is under the impression that I owe you...information.” Vegeta avoided his eyes, which was new to Trunks. “And she thinks that you are smart enough to get said information without it affecting you too deeply.” 

Trunks was starting to become as uncomfortable with this as his father seemed to be. 

“However,” Vegeta continued, “whether you are or aren’t smart enough to accept said information doesn’t mean I might be as willfully prepared to offer it...so I thought of a compromise.” 

Trunks was incredibly confused and also quite terrified. 

“I propose you ask me the questions you want to know the answer of, and I’ll do my best to be honest about them.” 

Well, fuck. 

“Dad, we don’t need to—” 

“We do.” Vegeta looked at him. “Your mother is right, we need to communicate somehow and...there is a lot you don’t know about me...that I’d rather you never knew, but that has nothing to do with you.” 

Trunks could have argued, but it would have made the current situation even more unbearably long, so he ignored it. 

They stayed in silence for some time, while Trunks attempted to figure out what to ask and how to ask it. He had been thirsty for answers before, but it was a lot more daunting when he had open fire to ask rather than having to accost his father for a response. In the heat of an argument, it was easier to remove the impending fear of ruining his frail bond with his father forever. 

Vegeta seemed as stern and collected as usual, but there was a sense of anxiety underneath his facade that Trunks could see only then. The closeness, the privacy and the information his mother had given him let him see his father under another light than that of the cold figure he had admired as a kid. 

“Alright…” Trunks sighed. “Mom mentioned that Saiyans in our Universe had a war with the Tuffles for the planet...she said there were different opinions on that, do _you_ think it was fair?” 

Vegeta frowned in confusion. Trunks assumed he probably expected more personal questions rather than political ones, and he would be right in that assumption, but Trunks felt they had to ease into that. And this was, actually, something he was eager to know. 

“I was taught that the war was for Saiyan independence, that Saiyans had been enslaved by the Tuffles and that war was a way to set themselves free from that.” Vegeta crossed his arms. “There is not a way for me to know whether that was completely true, but I believed the word of my father.” 

“Do you still?” 

“Does it matter?”

“Well, considering we are currently in a similar situation, _yes_ it matters.” Trunks lowered his voice, trying not to get as carried away as his mother did in arguments. “I assume that, if you still believed that, you would have invaded them by now instead of trying to tame the Army into political debate.” 

“They’re different, they don’t actively want war like our ancestors did.” Vegeta turned to him fully. “They are guided by their sense of justice, so making them wait wasn’t as hard as it would have been for our Universe’s Saiyans...but you’re right about me changing my mind.” 

He paused, seemingly looking for the right words. 

“I have come to question my father’s choices a lot in these past weeks, it seems, for various reasons.” 

Vegeta’s eyes were lost in the floorboards, introspective. 

“I don’t resent him nor can I be sure of whether the reasons for the war were true or not, but I can however make my own choices this time around and I guess I have... _learned_ differently, according to your mother.” 

“You mean on Earth?” 

“I mean in general.” Vegeta sighed. “The other Trunks would know more than you about how different I was back when I first settled on Earth, and even he wouldn’t know the full scope of it.” 

“I’m not him.” Trunks frowned. 

“I am aware.” He shook his head. “You’re like night and day.” 

Trunks stalled, the question close to been uttered, hanging in the air between them, but he wasn’t brave enough to make it. 

“Come out with it, boy.” Vegeta scolded. “What is it?” 

To hell with it, Trunks thought. 

“Does it matter much to you?” He asked, finally. “That I’m not him?” 

Vegeta seemed surprised and confused. 

“Why would it?” 

“Because I’m...he is... _you know_...”

“If I knew I wouldn’t ask you.” 

“He’s better.” 

“Better at what?”

“At everything?” Trunks avoided his father’s gaze. “Better behaved, more powerful, more resilient, more responsible, more...like a _prince._ ” 

Vegeta remained silent. 

“I mean sometimes...sometimes I feel like there was a mistake.” 

That was a loaded word and both of them knew it, so Trunks tried to elaborate without running the risk of crying in front of his father as if he was 8 years old again. 

“I feel like Bulla and him and Cabba all belong in a family with you and I’m...how can I put it? I’m like _a spare part_ , like I’m taking his place.”

He shook his head, speaking without giving his mind the time to think it through because, if he did, he would remain silent again. 

“I feel like I’m this sub-par version that is filling in for him until he comes back and _fits_ better.” 

Trunks sighed. 

“You know how in his timeline, Goten didn’t exist?” He smiled, but it was drenched in sadness. “I feel like I’m the one who shouldn’t have existed in this one, but there was a mistake somewhere along the line and I am here instead of _Him._ ” 

Trunks wished he could, somehow, take levity out of his words, which were hanging heavy in the room. He had never talked about this with anyone except for Goten, not even with his mother, and saying it to _his father_ , of all people, hadn’t been in his plans. 

“I never told mom because I know she feels guilty sometimes,” Trunks continued regardless, unable to stop now that he had started, “she feels guilty about a lot of things and she thinks I don’t notice that she does...I don’t want her to feel like it’s her fault, it’s my own shit, I don’t want her to have to deal with it.” 

There was silence, heavy, deafening silence. A moment of interlude in which Trunks wished he could take it all back. He was showing _weakness_ to his _father_ and that was all it possibly took to severe their relationship once and for all. 

“It’s not just on you, though.” His father’s voice cut through the hollow room. “It’s on us too, we’re your parents and we let you feel that way.” 

Trunks looked up, shocked. His father was looking at him, _really_ looking at him, and he couldn’t remember when was the last time that he felt so _seen_. 

“To answer your question, it does _not_ matter to me that you’re not him, because you are both two separate people.” 

Vegeta’s tone was confident at that, in that sort of way which left no room for nonsense and that made Trunks, as a kid, feel like everything was going to be ok, no matter what, because his father always knew what to do. 

“You’re both my sons, in his case in some roundabout strange way, but you’re _both_ my sons, you’re not the same person and were never going to be.” 

Trunks looked away, trying his hardest not to cry. 

“You are not a spare, you aren’t here to warm his spot until he comes back, and you are part of this family.” Vegeta sighed. “I’m sorry that I made you feel that way all this time.”

“I never said—” 

“You don’t have to.” 

Vegeta grunted, finding the words with as much difficulty as his son had. 

“I wasn’t ready for a family when you came along.” 

Vegeta’s voice was soft, unguarded, and Trunks almost didn’t recognize it. 

“I was angry, vengeful, lost and spiteful and I hadn’t been tied to a planet or people since I was a kid.” 

Trunks sat in silence, listening to his father, seeing the story play in his mind as he narrated the past he had been unaware of. 

“I was...I was a conqueror of planets under Frieza’s army, and even if I always hated him and wanted him dead, I still destroyed countless lives on his name, and was intent of ending Earth itself, with all the people you know in it.” 

Trunks felt chills run down his spine with the intense memory of his father opening fire on strangers in a tournament back when he was a kid, an image he had seen in nightmares for a long time afterwards. 

“I am not like Kakarot, who’s always been a savior, who’s always fought to defend his loved ones.” 

Vegeta shivered, almost imperceptibly, trying to keep the composure to continue his story. 

“I was a murderer and I insisted on being so for longer than I should have...I tried to go back to that person at some point because I was scared of how _attached_ I had grown to Earth, to your mother and to _you._ ” 

Vegeta paused, choosing his words carefully. 

“I learned with time that you all didn’t make me weaker, on the contrary, you became my reason to fight...because I had to learn that fighting for love is a possibility and that you can care enough for someone to do that.” 

There was a pause, a truth unsaid waiting to come out, much like when he asked about the other Trunks, but this time it was his father who was weighing the options, wondering it he could be truthful to him. 

“The first time I _really_ felt it, the first time I knew I had changed, was when I died in an attempt to destroy Buu.” 

Trunks had flashbacks of that day also in his nightmares for a long time. Nightmares about the emptiness Trunks felt at the thought of never seeing him again, at not having been strong enough to help him. 

“The decision of giving my life for yours was the easiest I have ever made.” 

Vegeta smiled, his sight lost in his memories, and Trunks was taken aback by how certain that sentence had sounded, how factual. He wondered how he had missed all this time the undercurrent of care his father’s words were drenched in. 

He had always heard it when it came to Bulla, that unsaid layer of love seeping through his father’s words about her, _to_ her. He had never before recognized it directed at himself, but now that he heard it like that, he could trace it back to so many moments before. 

A certain gust of wind pushing him back up in the Gravity Chamber whenever his toddler feet didn’t support him enough. 

An embrace in the battlefield, before a goodbye, before a sacrifice. 

A worried shout, to make him go home, to warn him to stay out of a fight against a mortal enemy who confused his ki with that of the other Trunks. 

A protective body blocking a certain threat from a mysterious planet, giving his own safety away again to protect his. 

The moment an image appeared, another one replaced it, filling his memory in a kaleidoscope of warmth. 

“I had seen the other Trunks die before me, but I hadn’t been anywhere near as understanding of the meaning of losing my family as I was when I faced the fact that you might have been in danger, and that it had been my fault to let it get that far.” 

Trunks shrunk in himself, his knees to his chest, but his eyes didn’t leave his father. 

“I should have understood then that I had unequivocally left the path of my father,” Vegeta continued, “I should have seen how different I was from the man who had delivered me to hell and sent my brother away instead of giving his life to prevent it.” 

“Do you resent him?” Trunks muttered weakly, after a heavy silence. 

“No, but I have come to understand that, as stupid as it sounds, it wasn’t my fault.” 

“Of course it wasn’t!” His tone made his father snap from his memories and look at him directly again, which prompted Trunks to lower it. “I mean, you were a kid, how could it have been your fault?” 

Vegeta looked at him with sadness, with regret, with something akin to guilt. 

“Trunks, you just told me you felt like a spare part and that it was your own shit to deal with.” Vegeta frowned, but it wasn’t with anger, it was with concern. “I know that this is something that has probably festered in you since you were a kid, and you also have no fault in it.” 

“It’s different.” 

“How?”

“You never abandoned me.” 

Vegeta stalled, his eyes shining with something that was too raw and vulnerable. He snickered, but it was a sad sound. 

“I did abandon you, but you were too young to remember it.” Vegeta looked elsewhere again. “You were a baby and I was terrified and stupid and I left you and your mother, even in dangerous situations.” 

“But you came back.”

“I should have never left.” Vegeta sentenced. “I guess I wasn’t only afraid of what you might mean to me but I was also terrified of you seeing in me what I saw in my father and then being just as disappointed.” 

Vegeta sighed, defeated. 

“I never talked to you about it all because I’ve always been afraid that, the moment you understood the monster I was, you’d never want me in your life again.” 

Trunks felt, in that moment, that everything made sense. 

In that room, in that moment, everything aligned properly and the parts that had never fit finally clicked together. He felt as if the only thing he was missing was to turn a screw another way, instead of the one he was _sure_ it was supposed to be turned, for everything to fall into place. 

He had spent years thinking his father would never understand him when, in reality, they were both terrified of the same thing.

“So, I have been scared that you’d think I wasn’t a good enough _son,_ ” he sentenced, “and you’ve been scared that I’d think you weren’t a good enough _father._ ”

Vegeta’s expression changed to one of realization as Trunks put it into words. 

“Your mother was right when she said you had inherited her brilliance.” 

Trunks smiled. There was a pause once again, but this one was less heavy, less cold. It was companionable, comfortable, and it felt _finally_ like home. 

“I...I think I’d like to know, whenever you are comfortable with sharing it with me,” Trunks continued, “about your past, your story...not _Saiyan_ history but _your_ history, dad.” 

Vegeta’s frown deepened. 

“You might never see me the same way again.” 

“Maybe not, because I can’t be 8 forever, thinking of you as an untouchable superhero.” Trunks smiled. “But I’ll never stop loving you just as much.” 

Vegeta looked at him again and there was something that felt so much like pride in his eyes that Trunks couldn’t stop a few tears from streaming down his face. 

“Don’t you _ever_ think again that you’re irrelevant to me.” Vegeta said, with his characteristic certainty again. 

If it was his mom, Trunks would have ran and hugged her. But there was this fence between him and his father that he felt he couldn’t quite breach. 

Still, Vegeta opened his arms in invitation and Trunks launched himself at him in a hug neither of them would mention to his mother, because she would never let it go. 

“Now, put yourself together because we have a meeting in a few hours,” Vegeta said, getting up and taking his cape from the bed. 

“A meeting?” 

“Yes, I’ve reached a decision on the Tuffle situation.”

Trunks’s already confused brain short-circuited entirely. 

“You want me to attend a political meeting?” 

“You’ve proven yourself prepared enough, asking those political questions...besides, you won’t be the only new addition to the committee.” 

“What? Who else will be there?”

“You’ll see in time, for now just take a shower and attempt to order this room, if that’s possible.”

“Yes, sir.” Trunks laughed. 

Vegeta smiled, honestly, and left the room, which felt to Trunks a lot more welcoming than it had in the past weeks.

* * *

Vegeta hoped his ki would be enough to alert Kakarot, because the idea of waking up his wife so early in the morning wasn’t an appealing one to him. 

“Vegeta?” The man in question exited the small home, his voice a groggy whisper. “Is something wrong?”

Vegeta made an indication with his head and Kakarot nodded in assent. They flew towards a mountainside where they could talk without risking waking up anyone else. 

“I came to ask you to bring your family into the palace this morning for a meeting.” 

Kakarot turned his head, as if he was adjusting his hearing because he couldn’t comprehend was Vegeta had said. The man sometimes seemed more like a puppy than a Saiyan. 

“You mean Gohan and Goten?” 

“I mean _all_ of them.” 

“Even the...non-Saiyan ones?” He seemed unbelieving. 

Apparently, while Vegeta was lost in maps and protocol, the Saiyans of Sadala had made it abundantly clear how unwanted the Earthlings were. Vegeta cringed. 

“Yes, Kakarot, even them.” he sighed. 

“I gather Bulma will be in the meeting, then?” Kakarot smiled. 

Vegeta’s instinct was to shout at him for being nosey and annoying, but he also understood that he had been a good friend to her when she needed it and probably knew more of the situation than Vegeta would have wanted him to. 

“Yes, she will, the solution I’m proposing was pretty much her idea.” 

“She’s smart like that.” 

“That’s an understatement, but yes.” 

“I’m glad you’re both talking again.” He scratched the back of his head. “This place is making us all...I guess _introspective_ is the word? I’ve had a conversation with Chi Chi last night that was long overdue.” 

Vegeta stalled, surprised. 

“Are they being mistreated here?” 

“Not really, I mean, it takes getting used to and there is some apprehension, but it wasn’t about that...it was about us.” 

Kakarot, smiled, absolutely besotted, and Vegeta preferred to leave the specifics to their own intimacy. 

“Huh.” 

The silence of the night was more profound in planet Sadala. Vegeta considered that Kakarot, living in the wilderness, was probably more used to it than he was, having changed the noisy mess of war for the hustle and bustle of the city. 

“Are _you_ ok, Vegeta?” 

He sneered at Kakarot’s question. 

“Why wouldn’t I be?”

“This is a huge mess you’ve been drawn into and I can understand if it brings back painful memories.” 

“You know nothing of my memories.”

“No, I guess I don’t, but unlike me, you _have_ them.” 

Vegeta looked at him, then. He had his eyes lost in the night sky, a faint smile on his face, as he usually had. 

“I can’t miss something I don’t remember, so to me all of this is new,” he continued, “but Chi Chi told me something I hadn’t thought much about, that even if I don’t remember it, I did lose something because of Frieza, just like you.” 

Vegeta uncrossed his arms, still looking at the man beside him. 

“Don’t get mad, I’m not saying it’s the same, I was very lucky for having the life I did and growing up the way I did, even with people trying to kill me when I was a child.” He laughed, genuinely, the burden of those words not heavy at all on his shoulders. “I’ve had my losses on Earth, though…” 

Vegeta remembered what Bulma had told him once about Kakarot’s Oozaru killing his adoptive guardian and later turning against his friends. It wasn’t until Trunks was close to being born that she had confided on him the story, as a reason for removing his tail at birth. 

It wasn’t her fear of the transformation itself what haunted Bulma, it was the pain of seeing her best friend, ‘the kindest person she knew’, as she put it, being unaware of having ended the life of his own family. 

“Still, I don’t get to miss all that I lost, like you do.” Kakarot looked at the village, in the distance. “I got to gain a family before knowing there had been one to miss...but sometimes I wonder how it would have been, had I been like Goten, as Chi Chi put it.” 

“Like Goten?” Vegeta frowned, confused. 

“With parents and an older brother to look up to.” 

Vegeta looked at the ground. He forgot sometimes that Raditz had been Kakarot’s brother, they were so different from each other, so far apart in every way he could think of. Much like them, Vegeta hadn’t developed a relationship with his own brother. 

However, seeing Trunks taking care of Bulla and watching Gohan look out for Goten, he wondered sometimes if there had been another possibility for them all, if the cold and distant way in which they were raised wasn’t a matter of being Saiyan but of always seeing things in the one-dimensional way Bulma had talked about. 

“Chi Chi thinks that I was robbed of that, but I don’t mourn it because I can’t remember it,” Kakarot said, “I guess I can’t miss those I didn’t know.” 

Some seconds of silence passed between them, as the tranquil night wind of Sadala started to give way to the dawn. 

Bulma had told him once that Kakarot was the most empathic person she had met. That he was very bad at words, very clumsy at social cues, but that he recognized people’s feelings instantly and knew how to act accordingly, as if per instinct. 

Kakarot was the biggest Saiyan anomaly, in so many ways. He was an instrument of peace, capable of bringing people together, of understanding them, born from a legacy of war and destruction. He was the biggest proof that Saiyans, as his father taught him they should be, weren’t born but made. 

As Kakarot shared his perspective with Vegeta he understood that he was doing it more for Vegeta’s sake than for his own. He knew Vegeta wouldn’t open up about things, he wouldn’t ask or tell, but he would listen and that could make him feel less alone. 

A friendship with Kakarot, however particular, was probably the most unlikely outcome of his life, even more so than marrying an Earthling and fighting in a team with Frieza on a tournament. 

“We have become different than the Saiyans before us.” Vegeta looked at the night sky as well. “But I’m starting to understand that it isn’t a bad thing after all.” 

Kakarot laughed. 

“I’m glad you think that way.” 

He thought of their children, of how different their lives had been growing up how they did. He thought of Trunks’s compassion, of Gohan’s humane sense of justice, of Goten’s impressive maturity, of Bulla’s stubborn bravery, of Pan’s uplifting energy. 

He thought of the unbreakable bond Trunks and Goten had. Of how linked they were, beyond anything he had ever known. He imagined how difficult it would have been for them, how impossible their bond, had they been born in Planet Vegeta, where class separated them from birth, where Trunks would have been raised to think Goten a lesser Saiyan and where Goten would have grown resenting Trunks’s privilege. 

In the world they were born in, they had been equals. They became who they were because of it. They had learned and grown into young men unable to think of themselves without the other. 

If Vegeta had been told, back when he was on Namek, as Bulma had put it, that it was his son and Kakarot’s son who he’d be thinking about in those terms, he would have denied it, enraged. Now, though, he couldn’t think of them in any other way. 

“Tell your family you’re all coming to the palace, but make sure they don’t make a mess, I know how much your wife likes to point out her opinion very loudly.” 

“That’s one of the reasons why she fit in so well here.” Kakarot laughed. “Better than I did.” 

“Yes, that makes sense.” He shook his head. “And also...tell Goten I’m sorry that they had to stay apart like that.” 

“He understands.” Kakarot smiled. “Also, he liked being the center of attention because the prince himself had come to see him.”

Vegeta sighed. 

“Those two need to learn some manners.” 

“As if we could ever be too strict with them, though.” Kakarot slapped his back, playfully. 

He took flight, smiling at Vegeta as he did. 

“We’ll see you in a couple hours, then,” he said, hovering in the sky, “ _King_ Vegeta.” 

Vegeta tsked, taking flight as well, going back to the palace. 

* * *

Bulla woke up when she felt her father’s ki in the palace again. 

She hadn’t noticed him leaving, but once the ki came back, she realized the void she had felt without it in the general vicinity, in the characteristic blend she learned to recognize as her father's, mother’s and Trunks’s distinctive energies all together in the same place. 

Her dad’s ki was a lot easier to spot than her mom’s, and it was the one she had learned to locate first, so long ago she didn’t quite remember how she had learned it in the first place. It felt a bit like a light, a strong light that she could focus on to go back where she was supposed to, whenever she got lost. 

Like a lighthouse, she thought. Her dad’s ki was her lighthouse. 

She looked through the window and saw him flying towards the garden across from her room, his cape flying in the wind. Bulla didn’t like the cape. It made them all seem like other people. 

He looked up to see her as he landed and she frowned, determined. It was time. 

She put her feet on the ledge, her nightgown flowing in the cold morning air, and she flew to him. Bulla’s eyes never left his face, so she could see his worried expression, which made her ever more angry. 

“I can fly just fine, dad.” She crossed her arms as she landed right in front of him. “You don’t worry when Trunks flies, you don’t need to worry about me.” 

“I know, Princess.” He sighed. “I’m sorry.” 

It took her about three whole seconds to disentangle her arms, change her frown to a choked sob and run to her father’s arms. 

“Dad...” she said, as he hugged her, “please don’t change us.” 

“Change you?” 

“I know we’re not fully Saiyan, but we’ll do our best,” she continued, “and mom is better than any Saiyan you could marry instead, power levels or not.” 

“Bulla…” 

“I know I have a bad temper and I’m lazy with my training sometimes, but I promise I’ll do better, I’m sure Trunks will too.” 

She felt her father’s hands on her shoulders, pushing her away slightly, as he knelt in front of her. 

Bulla wasn’t as short as she used to be, she was growing steadily. She noticed that whenever she looked up at her dad, at Trunks. Still, she always felt so far away from them when it came to their powers. 

“I’m not changing you, Bulla, I don’t know where you got that idea from, but it’s not true.” 

“Some Saiyans said so, I think they wanted me to listen, so I thought it might be true…”

She had been angry at them, furious, but also hesitant enough to doubt whether they were right. 

“I’m gonna kill them,” her father said. 

“Really?”

Bulla had never seen her father kill anyone, although she had heard the stories, to an extent. Still, she had never felt as conflicted about it as Trunks or her mom. 

Bulla sometimes felt like they were too emotional. She wasn’t about to go around killing people, but sometimes she felt like she didn’t have as high a level of empathy as they did. She was sure that her dad had his reasons for doing what he had done, and that if he ever had to kill anyone, he knew what he was doing. That was the father she knew, and she trusted his judgement completely. 

Vegeta might have noticed the lack of fear in her question, the curiosity over any kind of worry. 

“...No, it’s a figure of speech.” He sighed. “And you shouldn’t sound so interested, Bulla.” 

She frowned. 

“I mean it, I don’t want you to think that killing people is a good first resort to problems…” Her father sat down on the grass. “It took me a long time to learn that, Princess, so I’d like you to know it without going through as much pain as I encountered.” 

Bulla’s grasp of life and death wasn’t the same as most people around her. She hadn’t grown with as much danger as she knew Trunks had. She didn’t know the full extent of the things that had happened when she wasn’t there, but she understood that the lack of personal experience to compare it to meant that she was luckier with the period of history she got to grow up in. 

She also had learned from Beerus that sometimes cycles happened. He seemed, from the outside, erratic and prone to impulse destroying things, but she knew better. She had grown up around him, and he had taken care of her and regarded her with a kind form of curiosity. He was nice, but he was also honest and didn’t censor himself around her as much as her mom and dad did. 

And Beerus had explained to her that death was a part of life. That creation and destruction were two parts of the same thing, that one couldn’t exist without the other. He was, ultimately, there to keep balance, and he followed rules and guidelines as much as Kaios did. 

She had learned that death wasn’t inherently bad. Even the permanent kind. That it was necessary for things to continue happening. But sometimes she wondered if that kind of knowledge had made her less kind. 

“Is it bad if I don’t care as much as mom and Trunks do?” She sat down next to her father. “About death?” 

Her father’s eyes traveled above them, to the colors changing slowly, like watercolors in the sky.

“It’s very Saiyan, not to care,” he said, “it’s how I grew up too, how I was raised to behave, so I understand it more than you would think.” 

“But now you think differently.” Bulla’s sentence was a statement, not a question. 

“It’s easy to not care about death when you have nothing to lose, or nothing to compare it to.” He leaned on his hands, still looking up. “But when you find things you love, people you love, and you are faced with the possibility of losing them, you start questioning many things.” 

“I didn’t mean that I want to kill people,” Bulla explained, “I just can’t sometimes understand why there are people Goku and you forgive if they’re bad.” 

Her father sighed, but it wasn’t with impatience or annoyance. He seemed to be thinking about how to explain something better. 

“I sometimes don’t understand it myself, Kakarot is better at forgiving than I am, but I guess we just grew up in very different situations.” 

Bulla remembered what her mom had said, about her dad being five and taken away from his planet. How scared he might have been, she thought. How small. 

She couldn’t imagine her father being small or scared. 

“Still, I have to thank the universe that Kakarot is that way, because if he hadn’t been, I wouldn’t be here and neither would you.”

Bulla turned to him fully, surprised. 

“Why?” 

Her father turned to her as well, stern and determined. He looked as if he was undecided, as if he had a secret and was pondering whether she could keep it. 

“I used to be bad, Bulla,” he said. 

“I know.” 

Bulla had heard some things about that, overheard comments, and could put two and two together from the conversation they had with her mother. 

“I mean, I really was,” he continued, “I would have destroyed Earth, killed your friends, killed your _mother._ ” 

Bulla had a hard time imagining her father as an enemy. He had been nothing but a savior of the Earth since she had been alive. She could picture it, as if it was a story, and imagine him fighting Goku for real. But she couldn’t reconcile the idea of her father, the one she knew, with someone who would do the things he said he had done. 

“If Kakarot would have killed me the first time, if he had ended me instead of letting me run away, I would have never become the person I am today, the person you know.” Her father looked at the sky again. “And I feel that, in exchange, I owe him to at least try to give others the same...kindness.” 

He shook his head. 

“Although I’m not as much of a sensitive idiot.” 

Bulla giggled. 

“I think I understand.” She smiled. “I was worried that maybe I could be...evil for not caring as much as Trunks does.” 

“You’re not evil, Princess, thoughts and actions are not the same thing.” Her father put an arm across her back and hugged her. “And you’re learning, just as I did.” 

Bulla could see a shooting star, painting a line of silver across the watercolor sky, disappearing into the last bits of dark blue. 

“You are a bit terrifying, though.” Her father ruffled her hair. “You inherited both mine and your mother’s temper, after all.” 

Bulla smiled. 

“That’s not a bad thing.” She decided. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The title of this chapter is from the song [Bad Decisions by Bastille](https://open.spotify.com/playlist/1OAnG5DcGEpU4b426VTrEP), from the playlist that accompanied me while writing this fic.


	5. Go on and tear me apart, show me all that you've got, we will be so free

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A meeting, a strategy and a reigning Queen.

“Please, behave,” Vegeta said, in a low voice. 

Trunks frowned. His mother was dressed in her lab overalls, standing beside his father, and Trunks was standing on the other side, with Bulla next to him. Bulla and himself, in solidarity towards their mother, were dressed in their regular clothes, and their father hadn’t objected to it. 

Trunks didn’t understand, though, why he was being chastised. 

“I didn’t do anything.” 

“Not _yet._ ” 

It didn’t take long for Trunks to feel it. Goten’s ki. He felt all of them, but Goten’s was the first he noticed, a familiar pull, a gravitational force that was a part of him, even literally, whenever they fused. 

His eyes opened wide in realization, fixed to the window that was still shattered after his abrupt scene. 

“ _Behave._ ” his father repeated, stern. 

Trunks felt an itch inside him. He hadn’t realized the full extent of the void he housed until then, gradually sensing the energy that he was lacking, coming towards him with speed. He had felt it the previous day, as he flew towards it, but now, without the rage clouding his mind, he could wholeheartedly focus on the strain that tensed between them in separation. 

He wondered if his father, after having fused with Goku, also felt his ki as familiar, or if that was just another layer of his particular bond with Goten, something unique to them. He couldn’t imagine his father openly talking about any sort of bond with Goku, though, so he dare not ask. 

The man himself was the first one to enter, carrying Chi Chi in his arms. He deposited her gently on the ground and she remained close to him, looking around with suspicion and caution, as the severe eyes of the Sadala Army took her in. 

Gohan and Videl were next, with their daughter floating around them in circles. Pan was curious and energetic, waving happily at Bulla as she saw her, and Bulla waved back with a smile on her face. 

Goten, the bastard, was last. He landed with a sufficient smirk on his face, winking at him. 

Vegeta sighed. 

“Get comfortable, this is going to take a while.” 

Vegeta opted not to direct people specifically and let them mingle by themselves, which was, Trunks considered, a _bold choice_. The Sadala Army was suspicious and Goku’s family was hesitant. 

All except for the man himself. 

“Cabba!” Goku approached the young soldier, slapping his back in affection. “It’s nice to see you!” 

Seeing Cabba smile and return the pleasantries seemed to make the Army, in general, lower their guards a bit. Pan did just as her grandfather, walking towards Caulifla and Kale, who regarded her with some apprehension but also curiosity. 

“You made a number on that window.” 

Goten was right beside him. Trunks hadn’t even noticed, as concerned as he was on whether the Army would attempt to assassinate his friends. 

“I have to thank you for your visit,” he continued, “I got super popular in the village after you left, so many Saiyans asking me how I knew _the Prince_ …” 

Trunks shoved him with his elbow, frowning. 

“Bastard.” 

Trunks felt Goten’s hand in his, comforting, warm. He intertwined their fingers, grasping Goten’s hand and letting out a breath he felt he had been holding for hours. 

“I missed you.” Goten’s voice was honest, striped down from his playfulness. 

Trunks didn’t even know how to encompass in one sentence how he felt. Everything he could say seemed like an understatement. So, instead, he just grasped Goten’s hand tighter. 

He didn’t let it go when they sat down, one next to the other. He could notice the side-eye glances, the curious stares they were getting from some members of the Army. He considered again how his father’s decision of putting all of them in a conference room, to decide upon the future of the Saiyan race, was _quite_ a bold one. 

But his father was nothing if not bold. 

“It has come to my attention that we’ve been thinking about this conflict in the wrong way.” Vegeta’s voice cut through any whispers that might have lingered in the room. “We have been thinking in a...how did you call it, Bulma?” 

Trunks saw his mother take on a surprised expression, but also a cautious one. She clearly knew as much as Trunks himself about his father’s intentions, which was practically nothing. 

The room quieted down completely at the question, all eyes turning on her, confused and untrusting. 

“One-dimensional?” His mother offered, cocking an eyebrow. 

“Exactly, thank you.” 

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Caulifla looked at Bulma as if she had insulted her personally. 

Bulma was about to talk back but she stalled, frowning at Vegeta for an approval she probably didn't think she needed but which was wise to expect from a King with an entire Army questioning his choices. 

Trunks’s mother hated few things more than having to depend on Vegeta for something. His father just smirked, a gesture of his head prompting her to continue. 

"In my experience with Saiyan culture as an outsider...and I dare say Chi Chi and Videl might agree..." she nodded towards them, “...most of the decisions, relationships and ranks are established via power levels, which, in times of inter-planetary conflicts leave you at a disadvantage.” 

“Disadvantage?” Caulifla’s voice rose, defiant. “If we can defeat them in combat, there’s nothing more to it.” 

“We wouldn’t…” Cabba had trouble looking at Bulma directly, Trunks could understand the hesitation, “we don’t use that for conquest, like the Saiyans you’re used to, we’re fair.” 

“Fairness is a matter of perspective.” Bulma smirked. 

“What are you implying?” Caulifla’s tone was rising with each question. 

“I’m not _implying_ anything, I’m _stating_ something.” Bulma crossed her arms, lying back on her chair. “I’m stating that being ‘fair’ by using power level as a tool to impose your ‘fairness’ on other planets can go array very easily.” 

“We’ve never…” Cabba frowned, upset. 

“I’m not saying you _did_ , I’m saying you _could_ , if you forget perspective,” Bulma continued, completely unabashed by the entire army of Saiyans looking at her in defiance, “you’re not as butt-headed as Universe 7 Saiyans…” she smirked at Vegeta, “no offense.” 

Vegeta frowned and, to Trunks’s surprise, even _blushed_. 

“The thing is, you have something in common with them and that’s your unwillingness to compromise,” she sentenced, “and that, in inter-planetary relations, is a problem that most often leads to conflict.” 

“Saiyans compromising, I’d love to see _that._ ” Chi Chi snorted. 

Caulifla stood, offended, but Vegeta warned her with a scowl. She remained standing anyway, until Kale put a hand on her arm. 

“We asked them for _help,_ ” Kale said.

She seemed to be the most level-headed Sadala Saiyan in the room, as long as her outbursts of energy were contained.

“The least we can do is listen.”

“I didn’t ask for help.” Caulifla sat, reluctantly. “If it was my decision alone, I would have already traveled to that planet to kick their asses into comprehension.” 

“Universe 7 Saiyans at large used to think like you,” Bulma interjected, “and I think you can gather, by the fact that the vast majority of those left alive fit inside this room, that it didn’t take them anywhere great.” She smirked. “Present company excluded, of course.” 

“I mean, that’s fair.” Goku laughed. 

“Vegeta as a King can give you something you need desperately,” Bulma continued, “the perspective of someone who’s survived the mistakes of his predecessors, so that you don’t go the path they did.” 

“For what I understand, though,” Cabba argued, “there were a lot of...extenuating circumstances separating our present and their past.” 

“Well, yes, things won’t repeat in the exact same way,” Bulma said, “but you have to admit that it’s a bit foreboding the fact that the conflict you’re dealing with right now is eerily similar to the one that resulted in the conception of Planet Vegeta, and the subsequent Saiyan history that you differ in.” 

Cabba seemed surprised and remained silent, looking at Bulma in awe and with some hesitation. Trunks knew the feeling. 

“So what, then?” Caulifla still remained defiant. “What do you propose we do? Go there with food and gifts and ask them to be friends forever?” 

Some Saiyans laughed less discretely than they would have had his mother been a Saiyan-born Queen. 

“There you go again, being so one-dimensional.” Bulma didn’t break, though. “There are possibilities in between war and submission.” 

“Negotiation,” Videl said, following Bulma’s train of thought with a concentrated frown. 

“Would that be feasible?” Gohan interjected, “There aren’t many things in common between the two societies in order to hold a negotiation leverage.” 

“Which is why I said the power-level thing was a disadvantage.” Bulma nodded towards him in acknowledgement. “If you put all your chips on the same bet, you run out of options.”

“Meaning they don’t value their greatest asset enough to negotiate,” Videl continued, “they don’t care about power levels and they have rejected Saiyan protection.” 

Cabba looked somewhere between impressed, surprised and terrified of how they had been at a disadvantage the whole time. 

“So what?” Caulifla interjected, “it’s not like they have anything we want either.” 

“They do, though.” 

Trunks spoke up before being able to think it through. All eyes were on him at that, Caulifla’s particularly defiant and very intimidating frown as well. 

“They have the possibility to instigate conflict, which is why we’re here,” Trunks explained, “with your power level, any form of attack would make you conquerors, something Universe 7 Saiyans were ok with but you’re...you’re justice seekers, you can’t be colonizing planets.” 

“They can passively instigate conflict by making you react like you are now,” Goten added, by his side, “you’d break your oath to protect.” 

There was a heavy silence, filled with dread and worry, as if the Sadala Army had fallen into understanding, all at the same time, that they were losing a fight they hadn’t even started. 

“So, fighting isn’t an option.” Goku sighed. “That’s disappointing.” 

Chi Chi elbowed him, frowning, and Goten snickered. 

“But if we don’t have anything to offer…” Cabba asked, turning to Vegeta, “how are we going to negotiate?” 

Vegeta seemed impassive, relaxed, as if he had gone over all of this in his head a million times already and had, finally, reached the answer. Which was, most likely, what he had done. 

Trunks looked back on the past weeks with guilt and worry, understanding some of his father’s burdens for the first time. Goten must have felt his demeanor because he squeezed his hand in silent support. 

“We do have something worth their time,” Vegeta spoke again, for the first time since the beginning of the meeting, “well, not _we_ as Saiyans but _we_ as in the Royal Family.” He looked at Bulma. “This time, we have better tech than they do.” 

He said ‘this time’ as if they weren’t in another Universe, in another planet, but back in the days in which his father made the decision to invade the Tuffles and take their space, their tech and their resources. He said ‘this time’ as if Bulma was gifting him a better reality than he had ever lived.

It took a lot to leave Trunks’s mother speechless, but this had done it. 

“You sneaky bastard,” she told him, earning offended gasps from some of the Saiyans in the room. 

“You have better tech, better expertise, than the entire Tuffle planet does, and if their regard of technology is as it was in our Universe, they would gladly bend over backwards for a speck of your knowledge.” 

“Flattery is unbecoming to you, darling.” Bulma smirked. 

“Wait, but if we arm them with our tech, wouldn’t it be detrimental to us?” 

Caulifla had gone from ‘Earthling tech’ to ‘our tech’ in a second and Trunks didn’t miss that. 

“Well, not necessarily, that’s the beauty of science.” Bulma turned to her, putting a finger on her temple. “There’s always newer and better improvements from where that came from.” 

“You’d be willing to trade some of your family’s inventions with a planet of strangers?” Chi Chi looked concerned. 

“My dad would call it free publicity.” Bulma smiled. “It’s not like I’d be giving it away to Frieza’s Army, I don’t think these Tuffles will care much for weapons as they would for things to improve the lives of their people.” 

“Imagine if Frieza had ever tried to get his hands on Capsule Corp. tech.” Trunks wondered out loud. 

“That would have never happened.” Bulma winked at him. “If there’s someone even more one-dimensional than a Saiyan, and with a drama queen ego to top it off, that’s Frieza.” 

Vegeta’s satisfied smile at that didn’t escape Trunks’s attention. 

“What do you get in exchange, though?” Caulifla’s tone towards Bulma had softened somewhat. “You’d be giving stuff away for nothing.” 

“I might not be a Saiyan but my husband and children are, and if they need me, I’m there.” Bulma stood. “And I guess that, whether you like it or not, I _am_ your Queen, so I might as well prove my worth as such.” 

She walked towards the door, not waiting for anyone to move or react. 

“Now, if you excuse me, I have to put my ship on hold and figure out what array of inventions would impress a tech-based society the most.” 

The silence left behind in the meeting room wasn’t anymore one of animosity or suspicion, it was of awe and respect. It had taken his mother all of one meeting to change the minds of an entire alien society, and Trunks wasn’t even surprised. 

* * *

“That went well.” 

Bulma was driving the little Sadala ship, good enough for crossing from one planet to another but rudimentary enough to make her viscerally upset and somewhat concerned about safety measures. 

There wasn’t much room in it either, so her and Vegeta traveled alone back to Sadala. The Army had proposed intensely that they’d be accompanied by a soldier, a driver maybe, but Bulma refused. She needed her mind occupied, her hands on a wheel, her energy into something useful. 

Bulma had been nervous going in, but had a plan. She had talked with, been kidnapped by and negotiated with several alien races and entities before, so there was some experience to go by. 

The Saiyans had been somewhat upset when she rejected using Saiyan garb, befitting a Queen. It looked beautiful, though, the dress and the armor and the cape, but she preferred not to. Bulma considered that her overalls would not only make her feel more like herself, but also show the Tuffles that she was a neutral party, of sorts. 

She was, yes, the wife of the Saiyan King and the mother of the heirs. She was, yes, there to help them. But she was also an outsider, enough to have an objective perspective and offer something Saiyans had never offered before. 

Things went smoothly from there. Talking science was Bulma’s favorite thing and once she started being asked about her inventions, it was thrilling. Without her father there, without Capsule Corp. to represent, she was just herself, Bulma Briefs, showcasing what she could do, without any legacy to speak for her and without any doubt that she was as much of a genius as her father. 

She did, therefore, most of the talking. Practically _all_ of the talking. Vegeta stood aside, silent and respectful, yet paying attention to every word and phrase as if he was watching her fight, learning her attacks and her defenses. This was her battlefield and he got to see her thriving in it, for once. 

The Tuffles were apprehensive at first, somewhat pedantic later, but eventually lowered their guards, when they understood that Bulma wasn’t there to parade her expertise and show off, but to learn about them just as much. 

Bulma was fascinated by the Tuffle tech because it showed her the origins of the Saiyan and Frieza Army tech she knew. It was the core of it, and isolated from conquering purposes, it was developed into things she had never seen. 

They talked for hours. Not because it was hard to reach an understanding, but because it was such an interesting conversation to have. Most often than not, when Bulma was exposed to alien tech, she was also fighting for her life or someone else’s, so she didn’t have the opportunity to just focus on it. 

At some point she forgot she was even negotiating, and whenever she became too friendly with her hosts, making jokes or sharing too many personal details, Vegeta coughed discreetly and brought her back to the heavy reality of the situation. 

In the end, an agreement had been reached. There was to be peace between Tuffles and Saiyans, there would be an understanding. It was going to take time, adjustment and a lot of effort from both sides, but they were to become greater for it, Bulma could tell. 

“You did well.” Vegeta’s voice cut through her reverie, bringing her back to the present, to the dainty ship and their journey back to Sadala. 

“That’s so kind of you to say, Your Highness.” Her voice dripped with sarcasm. “I live to serve.” 

“It’s ‘Your Majesty’,” he corrected. 

Bulma looked at him, indignant, and found him smirking at her. She turned back towards the vastness of space with a frown. 

“I mean it, though, it was quite impressive.”

“I nerded out about tech and science for hours.” Bulma shrugged. “Hardly a political marvel.” 

“You did exactly what was needed to solve the conflict,” Vegeta continued, his voice stern yet warm, “It makes me wonder…” 

His voice drifted off towards a hesitant halt. 

“What?” She insisted, not looking at him. 

She had learned, in time, that sometimes he preferred space in conversation, to open up more freely. He was intimidated by her sight on him more frequently than she would have ever guessed upon meeting him for the first time. There was a sense of power in being able to disarm him with her eyes, but also a sense of warmth, of care, as if she had been gifted with the softest side of him and it was her duty to protect it. 

“I wondered what it would have been like…” his voice was soft, barely audible in the rickety ship, “...if this had been our life, if we had ruled together.” 

Bulma frowned slightly. 

“We would have never met, if this had been your life,” she argued, softly, “or maybe we would have, but under circumstances that would have _not_ led to this...to _us_.”

“I know, I just…” he continued, “I wondered for years, what it would have been like, but not…” 

He sighed, conflicted with himself, looking for words. She waited. She would always wait, if he needed it. 

“Not for me, I didn’t wonder about me...at least not after Buu.” 

She remained silent, her worried frown still there. 

“I used to wonder about what my life would have been if I had followed the path set for me, I always thought about it, especially during the worst days, the days I needed to remind myself of who I was.”

Bulma knew, without being told, that he meant the days under Frieza’s rule. 

“But after Buu...after you took me back and I found my place next to you, when I admitted to myself _finally_ that you were my home…” 

She tried hard not to gasp at that. 

“I started thinking about what it would have been like _with_ you, _for_ you…” Vegeta’s voice was soft. “Imagining myself as a Saiyan King was never as easy as imagining you as a Saiyan Queen.” 

She did gasp at that. 

“All that Saiyan bloodline bullshit aside, all that _irrelevant_ stuff aside,” he said, and it didn’t escape Bulma that he had never put it like that before, claimed it ‘irrelevant’, “you are perfect for it, you are ideal.” 

“You’re biased…” She smiled nervously, uncomfortable with so much sincere praise. 

“Maybe,” he said “but it’s hard to tell the two apart.”

“What two?”

“Whether I think you’re a perfect Queen because I’m in love with you, or whether I love you because you are the perfect Queen.” She could hear the smile on his lips. “I find that I don’t really care either way, both are true...you _are_ the perfect Queen and I _do_ love you.” 

It was Bulma now who didn’t dare turn towards him. She felt tears rolling down her cheeks, silent traitors of how her heart clenched inside her. 

It had been endless weeks of longing, doubt and fear. Of being put in the position she dreaded, of not being enough, something she never wanted to feel, something she always scoffed at. 

She had often, in their relationship, felt as if she couldn’t help him _enough_ , always back to that day when the Gravity Machine collapsed around him, he was trapped in the rubble and she couldn’t do more than hook him up to cables and fluids and _wait_. 

She had always done as much as she could, but she was also painfully aware that she was married to a legacy. To a man with a past as huge as a galaxy and a shadow as vast as an entire race looming over him. 

She was married to a legend. 

And she was only human. She was human, and scared, and flawed, and oh so in love.

“If I crash this ship because you’re making my vision blurry with tears, I swear…” 

His hand found hers on the steering wheel, easing the grasp she didn’t realize she had tightened so hard. 

“Let’s go home, Bulma.” His voice was stern now, confident and assertive. “Let’s go back to Earth.” 

His lips on her jaw were warm and soft, lingering in her proximity, pleading, caring and wanting. 

She didn’t chase his lips, though. Not yet. She needed to steer that vessel. She needed to get to Sadala faster. She needed to fix that ship. She had to take them back home. 

He kissed the corner of her smile with the reverence of a man who is worshiping a deity. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The title of this chapter is from the song [I Will Be The End Of You by HIM](https://open.spotify.com/playlist/1OAnG5DcGEpU4b426VTrEP), from the playlist that accompanied me while writing this fic.
> 
> Here are the full end notes for the fic, for whoever is interested. I'm keeping the ones I formerly had when it was a one-shot and posting them all together, with some edits.
> 
> — The Saiyan history depicted in this fic is a combination of various canons plus my own personal leeway. Canon hasn’t always been consistent on the depiction of Saiyan history, so I picked the pieces that I needed and threaded them with my own creative license, but I reckon it’s still pretty canon-lenient, for the most part.  
> — The power-level-based social classes are more U7 Saiyans than U6 Saiyans, for all I know, but I took some creative license in how to fuse the two.  
> — Even though I'm using the characteristics and overall political state of the U6 Tuffles that appear in Heroes, I chose not to mention or include Oren and Kamin, considering the timeline of the fic and the fact that I didn't need them.  
> — Caulifla and Kale are here part of the Army legitimately. After 10 years, more or less, since the end of Super, I headcanonned that Cabba would want them to join, and that would also mean more female Saiyans in positions of political power in my fic, which is something we didn’t see much of in Universe 7 Saiyans or DB at large.  
> — The Saiyans of Sadala are depicted maybe a bit more harshly than they would be in canon, but I took that leeway to make the story work. I mean, they aren’t completely off but maybe, in some instances, are harsher than they seem in canon. They’re a bit of a blend between Super’s Sadala Saiyans and U7’s Saiyans.  
> — I also took some leeway on the Saiyans/tech relationship, which isn’t born from nothing (the whole Tuffle conflict did happen), but I amped it up a bit for their rejection of Bulma as a Queen to work well.  
> — That conversation between Vegeta and Trunks was long overdue for me to write and, if you ever read my other db fics, you’re aware. I’m glad I wrote it.  
> — Trunks and Goten are, in this fic, two adults in a queerplatonic relationship. I have my headcanons on their orientations and how they identify but I felt that was not necessary to include in the fic. The conversation they have about it was originally written just for me, to get a hang of it better to write them, but I liked it so much I kept it in. This subject matter is very near and dear to my heart.  
> — I realize the Goku/Chi Chi conversation was a tiny bit of a derailment from the Briefs-focus, but I really really really wanted it to be there.  
> — This fic was born out of 2 things: 1) I wanted Bulma to kick ass as a Saiyan Queen on her own merit, 2) I marathoned 3 seasons of The Crown last year and was like ‘I want this but with Saiyans’. I’ve been working on it ever since.  
> — I am not a native English speaker and this fic was not revised by a beta, so all mistakes are my own and I’m very sorry in advance.
> 
> If you got this far, thank you immensely for reading, this fic has a special place in my heart and it means a lot if someone cares about it too ♥


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